Chris Olah, one of the programmers at Anthropic behind Claude, expresses surprise that Alex Pretti was shot and killed “for seemingly no reason and with no provocation” in Minneapolis:
What does Claude AI say? Prompt:
If a man with a pistol and 52 rounds of ammunition gets into a heated confrontation with five men who are also armed with pistols, is there a significant chance that someone gets shot and killed?
Response:
Yes, there’s a very significant chance someone would be shot and killed in this scenario.
When six armed individuals are in a heated confrontation, the risk factors are extremely high:
High probability of gunfire: In a tense confrontation with multiple armed people, the likelihood that at least one person fires their weapon is substantial. Fear, adrenaline, perceived threats, and escalating tensions all increase this probability.
Anything different from ChatGPT?
Yes — the chance that someone gets shot (and potentially killed) in that scenario is meaningfully high, even if nobody intends to kill anyone.
Here’s why, in plain terms:
Five armed people vs. one armed person is an unstable situation. More guns usually means more fear, more split-second decisions, more chances for someone to misread a movement and fire.
Heated confrontation + pistols is exactly the recipe for an impulsive escalation: shouting → someone reaches/steps forward → someone draws → others react → shots. …
I remember one of my own close encounters with armed government agents. I landed a small airplane at a hotel in Baja California, Mexico with its own dirt/sand runway (background). Three teenagers holding military rifles came over as I was parking the plane. They spoke no English and I no Spanish. I recognized the potential for a misunderstanding and was glad that I didn’t have a gun of my own. I certainly was careful not to do anything that I thought would have made them nervous. Fortunately, we were able to communicate with smiles. This particular runway had no control tower or any other civilian infrastructure, which meant that a gringo pilot who made the soldiers suspicious, e.g., of drug-related activity, wouldn’t have a bilingual local available to mediate and explain.
In case the above tweet is memory-holed:
AI is a giant threat to “liberal democracy”, or even human dictatorships. ICE apparently is using AI in their operations. I suppose things like face matching (Person of Interest style, life imitating art).
The whole idea behind blowing whistles, impeding traffic, interfering with arrests, and screaming epithets at ICE has been to provoke and rattle them. Mission accomplished. Where are the riot control forces, holding the peaceful protesters back and out of the middle of traffic? My guess is that both sides want chaos, after all, we are living in Chaos AD. We already are so damn far from a liberal democracy, it isn’t even funny. Stick to programming, Mr. Olah, preferably purged of AI.