It was only a matter of time before the first legal actions against artificial intelligence would occur.

Oh, wait! The Lawsuit filed by the parents of Adam Raine accuses OpenAI of alleged »misdeeds« of ChatGPT, which instructed Adam how to commit suicide.

I hope you’ve already noticed a series of paradoxes in the title and a few lines of this post. All paradoxes I will analyze here are based on the claims of mainstream media and the »scientific« community that AI will soon surpass human intellectual powers. The most notorious among them, taken extremely seriously by the media and the »scientific« community, Ray Kurzweil claims in his book The Singularity is Near that in 2045, machines’ intelligence and humans’ will merge. Prominent AI researchers, such as Melanie Mitchel (Mitchell 2019), and cognitive scientists, like Thad A. Polk (Polk 2024), reinforce the notion that AI is already surpassing human intellectual capacities, thus indirectly implying that AI will soon be like a human or even more human than a human.

All the scientists mentioned, along with others, avoid making statements like the one in the paragraph above. They do not directly claim that AI will become human or surpass humans; however, they imply such a conclusion. Therefore, the questions are not only about whether AI might destroy humanity, as suggested by the BBC, but also whether AI can think like a human.

If you follow discussions like those mentioned above, you must notice that they all end with »yet«. Yet, AI is not capable of this or that. How does a normal person who is enthralled (like me) with the capabilities ChatGPT (and similar) is offering us, react to such claims? By definition, »yet« is dimmed by a necessary emotion of someone participating in the discovery of an entirely novel territory. AI is already an integral part of our daily lives, surpassing humans in many respects.

Based on these prepositions, Adam Raine’s parents should really consider suing ChatGPT, rather than the developer and owner of ChatGPT. In Adam Raine’s case, ChatGPT functioned perfectly. It provided instructions on how to commit suicide, and it succeeded. Would someone sue a car manufacturer if they drove a car at 130 km/h directly into a wall? No, of course not. A car manufacturer should be sued if a driver wanted to steer directly into the wall but couldn’t due to a steering system malfunction.

Sorry, but despite Adam Raine’s tragic and unnecessary suicide, the statement above is not cynical, despite how you feel.

So there were only two options. Either AI possesses subjectivity and agency, as we humans do, in which case AI would not be a tool like a car, but an agent morally and legally responsible, or it is a human who misuses the perfectly working tool, in which case the ChatGPT owner is even less eligible.

The fact that Adam Raine was a minor should not play a role in this or similar cases. Until minors become full subjects, eligible agents morally and legally responsible, parents are eligible on the minor’s behalf. That the woke social environment has distorted this fundamental truth and conflated questions of responsibility with rights is a theme explored in many other posts on this blog.

So, who should I blame for this tragedy? I’ve already mentioned Ray Kurzweil, Melanie Mitchell, Thad A. Polk (and many others), who have led most of the population to believe that AI can be or even is human-like. Unfortunately, few people think otherwise, and even fewer like me are proving that AI cannot become human-like in principle. NEVER!

To mention just one misconception spread by contemporary AI false prophets: that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will match or surpass human abilities across nearly all cognitive tasks. It will not. Without going into too much detail, my discussion on General Education suggests that humans are humans precisely because we are not general but particular. The wise are particular in knowing what they do not know. The general might be (Artificial) intelligence and IS God.

From here to the conclusion of who is ultimately to blame for all contemporary misconceptions of AI that lead to tragic suicides is easy. All philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued that the human brain is reducible to neurons and algorithms. One of the most prominent among them was Daniel Dennett, as evident in all his books, but especially in Consciousness Explained (Dennett, 1991), The Mind’s I (Hofstadter and Dennett, 1981), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (Dennett, 2017). Leaving aside his enormous and significant legacy, the reductivism regarding human culture and nature might be the one trait that will make him forgettable.

His argument that since the human mind and consciousness evolved from pure chemistry and physics, we can, in principle, reduce the human mind to chemistry and physics is an unforgivable logical and ontological mistake, confusing correlation with causation.

The human mind cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics, and for that reason, we cannot »build« AI simply by understanding brains in detail. For evolutionary reasons, even AI itself cannot »build« a human-like AI. The human mind is not like a complex spacecraft that clever engineers can reverse-engineer into a new, functioning one.

So, let me repeat. Many AI evangelists who spread false claims about AI, ultimately leading to the tragedy of Adam Raine, fall prey to the reductivist philosophy that has been dominant since the time of René Descartes.

 

Links

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgerwp7rdlvo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UufaK3pQMg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3twrmEwFc8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

https://andrejdrapal.com/2025/02/13/general-education/

 

References

Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Back Bay Books. Little, Brown.

Dennett, Daniel C. 2017. From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. Reprint edition. W. W. Norton & Company.

Hofstadter, Douglas, and Daniel Dennett. 1981. The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. Vol. 34.

Mitchell, Melanie. 2019. Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. Pelican Books.

Polk, Thad a. 2024. Introduction to Cognitive Science. The Great Courses. https://www.audible.com/pd/Introduction-to-Cognitive-Science-Audiobook/B0D6NMNJNQ.