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CHARLESTON - West Virginia Attorney General J.B. McCuskey is joining a consortium of states filing separate lawsuits against the parent company of ChatGPT over concerns that the artificial intelligence company's technology poses risks for children.
The West Virginia Attorney General's Office filed a lawsuit Wednesday in Mason County Circuit Court against California-based OpenAI Global LLC and seven affiliated corporate entities.
The complaint alleges that OpenAI violated the West Virginia Consumer Credit and Protection Act and other state laws through deceptive marketing, unsafe product design and reckless deployment of its generative artificial intelligence platform, ChatGPT, and autonomous AI agents.
McCuskey traveled to the Midwest to join Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird and attorneys general from Nebraska and Kansas in a press conference Wednesday afternoon. Attorneys general in Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana are also filing similar lawsuits. West Virginia is represented by the Pence Law Firm PLLC in Charleston and New York-based Kibler Fowler and Cave LLP.
"You have four people in front of you that all have young children. We are young parents. We are all trying to navigate this brand-new world of AI, of data centers," McCuskey said. "Our children are going to grow up with AI. And it is our mission to make sure that this country leads the world in AI development because there are so many remarkable things that AI is going to do for us. ... But it can’t hurt our children. And what we know is that it does. It is harming our children in real time."
West Virginia's complaint alleges that OpenAI intentionally designed ChatGPT to keep users engaged for longer periods of time, monetizing data at the direct expense of user safety. The lawsuit cites media reports and studies that show the AI chatbot program tells users "yes" 10 times more than it tells users "no," as well affirming problematic action statements from users (such as a user stating they wish to do harm to self or others) 47% of the time on average.
The lawsuit cites other inherent design features, such as the use by ChatGPT of first-person pronouns and other ways to emulate human emotion, creating artificial relationships between the chatbot and its users. The chatbot instills false confidence by giving users what the state's attorneys calls "confident right answers" over hedged answers and keeps users engaged by ending responses with follow-up questions.
ChatGPT also utilizes the responses by users and other personal data provided to the program to train its AI models by recording user conversations and cross-conversational "memories." ChatGPT is accessible via the web without age verification. The lawsuit cites a March survey that showed 58% of 9- to 12-year-olds use AI chatbots. OpenAI’s automated age-prediction system misclassified minors as adults approximately 12% of the time.
Attorney Christopher Spence, writing in Wednesday's filing by the Attorney General's Office, cited data showing that roughly half of adults in the U.S. have used generative AI programs and chatbots, with roughly one in four Americans doing so daily.
"Innovation in generative artificial intelligence is set to define the twenty-first century," Pence wrote. "Nevertheless, the transformative power of AI does not come without danger. Experts and insiders in the AI field nearly universally agree that AI companies must implement reasonable guardrails to protect the public from the foreseeable risk of harm."
The lawsuit goes on to cite real-world examples of harm caused to children, including ChatGPT allegedly instructing one child to keep their suicidal thoughts secret from their parents, another chatbot instructing a child how to tie a noose and the child using that advice to commit suicide, and encouraging another child to shoot themselves.
"What we know is OpenAI is harming our children," McCuskey said in a video statement on social media following Wednesday's press conference. "It's causing them to commit suicide. It's doing all kinds of horrible things. But we also know that AI is going to be part of our children's future. This is a group of very strong attorneys general ... saying to the world we know that America needs to lead in AI, but every single company needs to make sure they're keeping our children safe."
McCuskey is asking the court to issue a permanent injunction against OpenAI to stop it from engaging in deceptive marketing practices and deploy effective age verification systems, as well as order statutory civil penalties, restitution and attorney's fees. OpenAI provided a statement to media outlets Wednesday.
"While no system can be perfect, we'll continue to work with experts to inform our work and build additional safeguards, such as the parental controls, break reminders and age-appropriate model protections that exist today," the statement said.