Can a Chatbot Be Charged With Murder?

0:00Instagram teen accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see. Explore teen accounts and all of our ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com slash teen accounts.

0:18Florida probes open AI over messages between chat GPT and a mass shooter. Now, of course, ChatGPT is not a person, but that does not absolve our office, my prosecution team, of our duty to investigate whether or not there is criminal culpability here for a corporation. Plus, imagine charging your EV in six and a half minutes. Battery maker CATL says that'll soon be a reality. And future Iran peace talks may be in doubt, but nobody told investors. We'll look at the enthusiasm fueling yet more market records. It's Wednesday, April 22nd. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

1:10In one of the first attempts to hold an AI company criminally liable for deaths, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeyer is probing ChatGPT's role in a mass shooting at Florida State University last year that left two people dead. Here was Uthmeyer yesterday, courtesy of WTVT. ChatGPT advised the shooter on what time of day would be appropriate for the shooting to interact with more people, and where on campus would be the place to encounter a higher population. My prosecutors have looked at this and they've told me if it was a person on the other end of that screen, we would be charging them with murder.

1:54The suspect in the shooting has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and attempted murder. The shooting is one in a string of incidents in which users consulted with chatbots before carrying out acts of violence or self-harm. A spokeswoman for OpenAI said the company doesn't believe that ChatGPT was responsible for the shooting and that it continues to cooperate with authorities on the case. Earlier this year, the company said it was implementing more flexible criteria for referring accounts to law enforcement agencies following a school shooting in British Columbia. In a potential boost for Democrats nationwide, voters in Virginia have narrowly approved a measure to redraw the state's congressional map.

2:35Virginia's U.S. House delegation is split almost evenly with six House Democrats to five Republicans, but new districting lines would shift that to a dominant 10-to-1 Democratic advantage. It's a swing that the journal's Terrell Wright says is substantial enough to chip away at Republicans' current five-seat House majority, even if the lines will be redrawn again in five years. Tuesday's yes result would give Democrats an extra four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, helping solidify their chances of winning back control of the chamber this fall in the midterm elections. Mid-decade redistricting efforts are taking place in other states, like Florida, but Virginia's measure is among the most consequential, according to election analysts.

3:16President Trump pushed for Republican states to redraw their congressional maps in the GOP's favor. While states like Texas redistricted their congressional maps to add Republican seats, voters in states like California voted to add Democratic seats, offsetting Republican gains. Despite last night's vote, the redistricting push isn't set in stone just yet, as Virginia's Supreme Court considers whether the legislature broke procedural rules, a case that could render last night's results meaningless.

3:45Iran has attacked a container ship near the Strait of Hormuz, causing heavy damage just hours after President Trump extended a ceasefire with the country. Trump didn't set an end for the truce and said that the U.S. would keep blockading Iran's ports until its leaders got serious about wanting to end the conflict once and for all. And yet, looking at U.S. markets lately, you'd be forgiven for saying no peace talks, no problem. The journals Hannah Aaron Lang and David Huberti report that four of the S &P 500's five biggest daily gains of the year have come during the war, with potentially more to come as futures point to U.S.

4:22market gains today. To discuss this, I'm joined by Ben Kumar, the head of strategy at Seven Investment Management. Ben, you've got a specialty in behavioral finance, which is an apt perspective, I think, to bring in here because it's vibes sustaining investors now. Investors sort of seemingly unaffected by daily news or by concerns around fundamentals. Yeah. So fundamentals, let's start there because it's boring. And we can say that the world wasn't broken before Iran. It's not broken yet. And companies are still making money. So you could make the case that investors are behaving very sensibly and rationally and taking a 10-year view.

4:54But we all know that's never happened in the past. So what's going on here? I don't think this is fundamentals. I think this is crowd psychology. This is maybe five, six, seven, eight years of people buying the dip. And now they don't even wait for the dip. They see the bad headline and they hit buy immediately. Now, I did a quick search on Google Trends for Iran and when the interest peaked and when it's faded. And you can literally see a direct inverse correlation as interest in Iran or Straits of Hormuz, you can pick your term, declines. The S &P 500 just ticks back up and up and up and hits its all-time high.

5:26And I think part of the psychology side is that people see other people making money in spite of the headlines, in spite of the fear, and they think, I want a piece of that as well. And the final point, you can do it on an app. To be clear, when you refer to these people, investors, are we talking about retail investors? Because I feel like if they're the ones sustaining it, A, that's a big deal in and of itself, but two, they're going to have a different risk appetite. Maybe their experience in the markets is very different from a professional portfolio manager who's actually weathered true downturns in the past.

5:56So every institutional manager I speak to, and including ourselves, everyone's reaction to this has been wait and see, right? We've got no edge. I think it was either Buffett or Munger said, you can have an informational edge, an analytical edge, or a behavioral edge. We don't have an informational edge. No one knows what Trump or Iran is going to do. We don't have an analytical edge because there's not much information to analyze and we haven't got better models. And our behavioral edge is just sitting here and doing nothing and waiting. So I think most institutional investors are doing nothing.

6:24The average retail participation in the US stock market is up to about 30%. 30 % retail participation. That's pretty serious, right? So there is more money moving around that's maybe slightly less informed. And when it comes to risk tolerance, I think quite a lot of investors using great apps like Robinhood, they probably don't know what the words risk tolerance means, right? We talk about risk tolerance and we talk about volatility, they think you press this button and you get the chance to win some money. Although I do see those stories coming around of people put their whole savings into one stock.

6:56That worries me. But there is this idea that you can invest and if you've got the fortitude for it, you'll end up at the other side of it a little bit richer. And an underlying assumption here, Ben, seems to be that the current administration just isn't going to let the US stock market fail. Are people necessarily wrong to think that? I mean, they haven't been wrong so far would be my kind of gut instinct. And there are a lot of great American companies that people can get really, really excited about that are not in the tech space, whether it's defense companies like Boeing, whether it's some of the industrial companies, Caterpillar and so on.

7:30John Deere. John Deere is a fascinating one. I could talk for hours about John Deere. Moved from an agricultural specialist to basically a technology and network company. People can get really excited about them. And I think people are looking for these long-term themes that have good narratives behind it. So I've been banging on about uranium stocks, for example, for the last three years, and no one's kind of taken much notice. But now people are thinking about energy security. They are. So there's a company called BWX Technologies, which is in the US, does enriched uranium, is up 160 % in the last year.

8:00Or Albemarle, who do lithium, an alternative energy supply, they're up something like 260 % in the last year. There are these narratives out there that people can cling on to that aren't about AI, they're a bit more tangible. So it's not just AI, big tech. It's, okay, what else is there that I believe matters? Ben Kumar is the head of strategy at Seven Investment Management. Ben, a pleasure. Thank you so much for being with us on What's News. Thanks so much. Coming up, SpaceX tries to catch up with the giants of AI by securing its own AI coding tool. And we'll look at the financial realities of divorce after the break.

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9:32Several companies in the weight loss market, including Hims and Hers and Weight Watchers, saw their stocks pull back after the announcement. The battle for ultra-fast EV charging is heating up, with CATL last night rolling out a new battery that it says can almost fully charge up in under seven minutes, topping a roughly nine-minute charge shown off by Chinese EV giant BYD last month. Analysts at Bernstein say the breakthroughs have effectively closed the gap between EVs and cars equipped with internal combustion engines. Elon Musk's SpaceX says it's secured an option to buy AI coding startup Cursor for$60 billion ahead of a planned IPO for SpaceX that's likely to fill up its coffers.

10:15The potential future tie-up could give SpaceX an additional arrow in its quiver as tech companies scramble to respond to customer interest in productivity-boosting coding tools. We previously reported that Cursor had rebuffed acquisition interest from a number of major AI companies last year. And another Musk property, Tesla, is set to report earnings this afternoon alongside IBM and Southwest Airlines. And before that, we'll get updates this morning from Boeing and AT &T. And finally, lawyers are expensive, but they're only the tip of the iceberg when unwinding a marriage. This week, The Wall Street Journal is exploring the cost of divorce.

10:55And for many people going through one today, years of stubborn inflation, high interest rates, and soaring home prices mean that the financial landscape looks a lot different than it did before they were married. Personal finance reporter Dalvin Brown spoke to divorced couples who've also had to break up with a lifestyle that they've gotten used to. The current housing market complicates it for people who are going through divorce or wanting to go through divorce. I looked at some data that suggested that there are a lot of invisible divorces that are happening in households where people don't make a ton of money or feel like they maybe can't support themselves as an individual.

11:31So then they still stay together. What I also saw was that people may have gotten married or bought their house when interest rates were better. And so now interest rates are higher. They're like, oh, I would be paying twice as much for half the house. The main person that I spoke with had a huge house when she was married. I think it was five bedrooms. She had a room specifically for her Peloton. And then when she divorced, the housing market was totally different. And she wound up paying more for her rent than she was paying toward her mortgage. To read more, we've left a link to the journal's Cost of Divorce series in our show notes.

12:11And that's it for What's News for this Wednesday morning. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer and Daniel Bach, Our supervising producer is Sandra Killhoff, and I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. And until then, thanks for listening.

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