The Onion just published a story about a ChatGPT risotto recipe making a Molotov cocktail instead. My thoughts.
The Bluesky post from The Onion, with the link to that single-paragraph story, is at the end of this OP.
Fwiw, as much as I hate a lot of what Sam Altman has done, I hate much more that a Molotov cocktail was thrown at his home, and that shots were fired at it. Violence like this is NEVER okay.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/13/tech/sam-altman-openai-arrest-charges
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/12/sam-altman-s-home-targeted-second-attack/
Again, violence like this is NEVER justified.
Sam did say in a blog he posted a couple of days ago that the "the fear and anxiety about AI is justified" - https://blog.samaltman.com/2279512 - but he did not mention how much his own statements about AI have ratcheted up that fear and anxiety, with him even saying in 2023 that AI could mean "lights out for all of us.". Fortune article from 2023 on that and other things he'd said by then:
Sam Altman, the man behind ChatGPT, is increasingly alarmed about what he unleashed. Here are 15 quotes charting his descent into sleepless panic
https://fortune.com/2023/06/08/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-worries-15-quotes/
And that article does't even mention a 2016 profile in The New Yorker where he'd revealed he's a doomsday prepper - https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217685127 - in part because of fears about how dangerous AI might turn out to be. He's made preparations most people can't afford to make. (He also brought up, in that 2016 article, that he'd given a lot of thought to how many people he'd be willing to kill to keep his loved ones safe...and the figure he'd come up with was 100,000. The reporter, amazingly, did not ask any followup questions about what scenarios he'd been giving a lot of thought to where he considered killing 100,000 people.)
That Molotov cocktail was thrown at Sam's home Thursday night.
Earlier on Thursday this story about OpenAI made headlines:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143647265
OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-backs-bill-exempt-ai-firms-model-harm-lawsuits/
The effort seems to mark a shift in OpenAI’s legislative strategy. Until now, OpenAI has largely played defense, opposing bills that could have made AI labs liable for their technology’s harms. Several AI policy experts tell WIRED that SB 3444—which could set a new standard for the industry—is a more extreme measure than bills OpenAI has supported in the past.
The bill, SB 3444, would shield frontier AI developers from liability for “critical harms” caused by their frontier models as long as they did not intentionally or recklessly cause such an incident, and have published safety, security, and transparency reports on their website. It defines frontier model as any AI model trained using more than $100 million in computational costs, which likely could apply to America’s largest AI labs like OpenAI, Google, xAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
-snip-
Under its definition of critical harms, the bill lists a few common areas of concern for the AI industry, such as a bad actor using AI to create a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon. If an AI model engages in conduct on its own that, if committed by a human, would constitute a criminal offense and leads to those extreme outcomes, that would also be a critical harm. If an AI model were to commit any of these actions under SB 3444, the AI lab behind the model may not be held liable, so long as it wasn’t intentional and they published their reports.
I haven't seen anything about whether it was that specific story - about OpenAI considering it likely enough their AI would be used for a mass casualty event that they want legislation NOW shielding them from liability - that precipitated the stupid and unjustified attacks on Altman's home.
But that was part of the background for the "fear and anxiety about AI" that Sam said is justified.
And part of the background, too, for The Onion's joke about ChatGPT and Molotov cocktails...which is already very popular on Bluesky.
Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto https://theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-cocktail-at-sam-altmans-home-claims-he-was-following-chatgpt-recipe-for-risotto/
— The Onion (@theonion.com) 2026-04-13T20:00:17.079239408Z
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