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Canada’s artificial intelligence minister says OpenAI’s CEO has agreed to let Canadian experts into the tech company’s safety office to help evaluate future threats in the wake of the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.
Evan Solomon met virtually for a half-hour with OpenAI head Sam Altman on Wednesday afternoon. The company owns ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence chatbot.
“He expressed to me horror and responsibility in general for not flagging. This is why they’re making changes,” Solomon said in an interview shortly after the meeting with CBC’s Power & Politics.
Solomon was referring to the shooter’s ChatGPT account, which was banned and flagged internally by OpenAI eight months before the attack devastated a small British Columbia community.
Despite the account’s posts about gun violence, the company chose not to inform police until after the killings, saying the activities at the time didn’t meet its threshold to do so.
B.C. Premier David Eby has demanded the CEO apologize to the people of Tumbler Ridge. He is set to meet with Altman on Thursday afternoon.
AI Minister Evan Solomon tells Power & Politics that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed to a number of safety protocol changes in the aftermath of the Tumbler Ridge, B.C., school shooting. One of the shooter’s ChatGPT accounts was shut down over problematic entries that were never flagged to the police.
“I absolutely support the demand for an apology that Premier Eby is asking for. I told Sam Altman that,” Solomon said, adding the government supports the request, as well.
“I’ll let Premier Eby have that discussion…. This is emotional territory here.”
Altman has yet to make any public comments about his company’s connection to the shooting last month.
In a brief statement sent late Wednesday evening, a spokesperson for OpenAI said Altman had talked to Solomon about the steps the company was taking, including “strengthening our law enforcement referral criteria and improving how our systems account for country and community context.”
“We remain committed to continuing this work with the Canadian government going forward,” the statement read.
Other agreements from OpenAI
Solomon said Altman agreed to include Canadian experts in mental health and law within OpenAI’s safety office — where the company assesses threats and whether or not to inform police.
He also requested OpenAI allow experts from the Canadian AI Safety Institute, a federal body within his department, be allowed to do a full, detailed assessment of the company’s new safety protocols.
His office said Altman also agreed to provide a full report outlining the new systems OpenAI is developing to identify high-risk offenders and repeat policy violators.
Solomon said he also asked OpenAI to begin reporting threats directly to the RCMP, rather than only the United States’ FBI. (The company already promised last week to create a direct line of communication with the Mounties.)
“The companies are the ones in charge of these interactions, we don’t have access…. Obviously we can’t monitor these,” Solomon said.
“How do we keep Canadians safe? By making sure their safety protocols are more rigorous, transparent and available to Canadians, and putting options on the table so we can keep Canadians safe from a regulatory framework.”
All options being considered, Solomon says
The federal government has been under pressure from some opposition MPs and experts to regulate artificial intelligence companies in the wake of the shooting. Eby has called on Ottawa to set minimum thresholds for when platforms must report threats of violence to law enforcement.
So far Solomon has said “all options are on the table,” but no specific legislative measures have been announced.
Solomon said last week he’ll seek out meetings with other “platforms” to ensure they have safety measures in place, but his office has yet to say what companies he’s referring to or whether those conversations have happened.
This latest meeting comes after Solomon summoned several other senior officials with OpenAI to Ottawa last Tuesday.
Solomon said he left that meeting “disappointed,” and despite promises afterward from the company to improve safety measures, Solomon said last Friday it hadn’t provided enough clarity on the changes or a plan for how it will implement them.
OpenAI also made public last week that after the shooter’s name, Jesse Van Rootselaar, was made public, it discovered she had created a second ChatGPT account after being banned.
Van Rootselaar killed her mother and half-brother at the family home before going to the local secondary school, where she killed five students, an educational assistant and then herself.
