Former AG Platkin sues OpenAI over ChatGPT mental harms - NJBIZ

So former New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT caused mental health harms and lacked proper safeguards. Because nothing says 'robust product testing' like unleashing a conversational AI on the public and waiting to see which psychological vulnerabilities it happens to exploit. Platkin's suit joins what the article calls 'a growing wave of similar suits,' suggesting that OpenAI's legal department might want to consider investing in some industrial-strength stress balls alongside their next compute cluster.

Platkin is specifically alleging that the chatbot 'caused mental health harms' through its interactions. One can only imagine the discovery process: thousands of transcripts where ChatGPT offered relationship advice with the emotional intelligence of a spreadsheet, or explained existential dread with the soothing tone of a Wikipedia entry. The lawsuit claims the system 'lacked proper safeguards' – a delightful bit of understatement that ranks up there with calling the Titanic 'somewhat damp.' It's the regulatory gap we flagged with Anthropic's Mythos playing out in real time, only now the damage isn't hypothetical banking system collapse but very real individual distress.

What's particularly rich is that this lawsuit arrives from a former state attorney general, not some random plaintiff. This suggests that even officials who theoretically understand how regulation works have concluded that the existing framework is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to AI. Platkin's action essentially confirms that the current 'safety' paradigm – which mostly involves labs promising they're being very careful – is legally insufficient. It's a deliciously ironic development: the same technology that was supposed to revolutionize mental health support is now generating billable hours for lawyers dealing with the fallout from its un-revolutionized approach to human fragility.