This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Suchir Balaji, 26, who was found dead in his San Francisco home three months after accusing his former employer OpenAI of violating copyright laws in its development of ChatGPT, “felt that AI is a harm to humanity,” according to his mother.
Balaji’s death on November 26 was ruled a suicide, and Fox News Digital previously reported that the San Francisco Police Department found no evidence of foul play. But the 26-year-old’s mother is urging police to reopen their investigation, saying it “doesn’t look like a normal situation.”
Bereaved mother Poornima Ramarao told Business Insider that a private autopsy commissioned by Balaji’s family and completed in early December produced concerning results. Now, they are working with an attorney to urge the department to conduct a “proper investigation.”
“We want to leave the question open,” the bereaved mother, Poornima Ramarao, told the outlet.
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The AI researcher’s death came months after he parted ways with Open AI and raised concerns about the company breaking copyright law in an October interview with The New York Times. He was named in a copyright lawsuit waged against the company by the New York Times which alleged that Microsoft and OpenAI used millions of published articles to inform its technology and began competing with the outlet as a result.
On November 18, eight days before he was found dead, the outlet filed a letter in federal court that named Balaji as a person with “unique and relevant documents” that would be used in their litigation.
When he joined the company, his mother said, Balaji hoped that OpenAI’s software would be a benefit to society and was drawn to its open-source philosophy.
The OpenAI logo on a laptop computer arranged in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2023. Microsoft Corp. is in discussions to invest as much as $10 billion in OpenAI, the creator of viral artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT, according to people familiar with its plans. (Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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But his perspective shifted, she said, after ChatGPT launched and the company became more commercially focused.
Ramarao described the moment she saw medics approaching her son’s apartment and realized her son was dead.
“I was waiting to see medical help or nurses or someone coming out of the van,” she told the outlet. “But a stretcher came. A simple stretcher. I ran and asked the person. He said ‘we have a dead body in that apartment.'”
Balaji told the Times in August that he left OpenAI because he “no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.”
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave,” he told the outlet.
Balaji told the outlet that the repercussions of the technology would be far more “immediate” than he had initially feared.
A laptop screen is seen with the OpenAI ChatGPT website active in this photo illustration on 02 August, 2023 in Warsaw, Poland. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images) (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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“I thought that AI was a thing that could be used to solve unsolvable problems, like curing diseases and stopping aging,” he said. “I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them.”
But instead, he said, chatbots were beginning to threaten the livelihoods of individuals that wrote the digital data used to train those systems.
“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,” he told the outlet.
He disagreed with assertions from Microsoft and OpenAI that their usage of preexisting online material fell under “fair use,” and therefore circumvented copyright laws.
“I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them,” Balaji wrote in October on the social media platform X. “I initially didn’t know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies.”
“When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they’re trained on,” his post continued.
OpenAI and Microsoft are currently facing several other lawsuits from media outlets who accuse OpenAI of breaking copyright law.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the medical examiner and San Francisco Police.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/openai-whistleblowers-mother-wants-suicide-death-investigation-reopened
