Shooting Daycare Children Using AI? But Luckily Caught

The kind of atrocities that people have been contemplating using artificial intelligence has been going up consistently for the last few months since AI became a part of day-to-day life.

This is getting elevated further, if we look at the latest incident, where an Australian man thought of the unthinkable while conversing with artificial intelligence.

David Lan who is a resident of Hurstville in Australia was arrested on 18 October after Interpol flagged conversations with Anthropic’s Claude.

Police allege he said he would go down to the local Westfield right now and shoot up the local daycare and referenced the Bondi Beach attack. This immediately triggered a security panic, and the artificial intelligence alerted the Police about the same.

He was charged with abuse of Internet to harass or offend and later got remanded for a mental health assessment.

Prosecutors described the risk as catastrophic considering the extreme nature of the search that this man had made about shooting daycare children.

His lawyer said it was a stressed rant while seeking help for an ear infection in voice mode, that he believed the chat was private, and that he has no criminal history.

On one hand, it is lucky that artificial intelligence is able to determine such extreme threats to the society. But at the same time, it is extremely distressing and concerning to see people even have such thoughts in the first place.