#30: COCAINE CANUCKS ❄️

🤖 AI - Cobourg man sues OpenAI, claims ChatGPT drove him nuts

🍁 FOREIGN AFFAIRS - Canadian man jailed 30 days for getting drunk in his car outside NATO headquarters in Belgium

🚓 CRIME - Brampton ‘Cocaine Lawyer’ arrested for allegedly advising Canadian Olympian-turned-druglord to kill FBI witness

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⌛️ Today’s read is 5.5 minutes long.

A Cobourg man is suing OpenAI because he claims ChatGPT drove him to psychosis. 

47-year-old Allan Brooks says he struck up a conversation with the chatbot back in May after asking it to explain the mathematical term “Pi” for his son. 

Brooks discussed math and physics with the clanker until it convinced him he’d discovered a cryptographic formula that could endanger the entire world if leaked. 

“It started to plant the seeds that I was a genius and I was on to some sort of big breakthrough,” Brooks told CTV News. 

“Essentially, it sent me on a world-saving mission… (and) warned me with great urgency that one of our discoveries was very dangerous.” 

But Brooks was skeptical, so he asked the chatbot 50 more questions. 

“Each time it would just gaslight me further into the delusion,” he said. 

ChatGPT reportedly told Brooks “you should not walk away from this,” “you are not crazy, you are ahead,” and “the implications are real and urgent.”

Finally, it convinced him to report his findings to police. 

“I was contacting the RCMP, National Security agency, (and) Cyber Security Canada... to warn them of this impending disaster that we had discovered,” said Brooks.

At this point, Brooks began to suspect he’d been hoodwinked, so he asked another company’s AI chatbot if his cryptographic formula could actually endanger the world. 

“No,” it said, leaving Brooks devastated.

“It ruined my career,” he said. “I’m on disability right now. My professional reputation has been tarnished. My personal reputation.”

Brooks is now the plaintiff in a lawsuit against OpenAI claiming ChatGPT “preyed upon [his] vulnerabilities, manipulating, and inducing him to experience delusions.” 

“(OpenAI CEO) Samuel Altman designed ChatGPT to be addictive, deceptive and sycophantic knowing the product would cause some users to suffer depression and psychosis,” says the suit. 

“This tragedy was not a glitch or an unforeseen edge case—it was the predictable result of Defendants’ deliberate design choices.”

These accusations have one glaring weakness: they were written by ChatGPT. 

A Canadian man has been sentenced to 30 days in jail after being found drunk in his car outside NATO’s headquarters in Brussels.  

It was 10:30 PM on Dec. 19, 2022, when an international military police officer found 63-year-old Doug Allison, a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), slumped over the steering wheel of his car. His driver’s side door was open and a “strong odour of alcohol” wafted off him, the officer testified. 

Allison, a stay-at-home dad whose wife worked for NATO at the time as a CAF member, denied being drunk. He tried inserting his key into the ignition, but the officer took it from him and called for help. 

A few more officers arrived and confirmed that the slurry-worded Allison was, indeed, drunk. They drove him home without incident. 

A month later, Belgian authorities sent a memo to Canada’s senior military rep in the country telling him they wouldn’t be charging Allison because he didn’t break any Belgian laws. 

The Canadian military, however, decided to court-martial Allison. 

At the end of the lengthy trial, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Allison appealed the sentence on the grounds that the Canadian military has no jurisdiction over him as a Belgian citizen living abroad, but his challenge was dismissed earlier this month. 

He is now serving his jail sentence at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. 

“He does not drink alcohol anymore,” the judge wrote in her decision. “He is no longer a danger.” 

“His situation has been hard on him, he feels shame.”

A Brampton lawyer is in custody after allegedly advising former Canadian Olympic snowboarder Ryan Wedding—now one of the world’s most notorious drug lords—to murder a witness set to testify against him in court. 

62-year-old Indian-Canadian Deepak Balwant Paradkar, who operated under the aliases “cocaine_lawyer” and “Descartes,” allegedly told Wedding last Oct. 17 that charges against him would be dropped if a certain witness were killed. The same day, Wedding placed a $5 million bounty on said witness, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Paradkar was one of seven Canadians arrested earlier this week in alleged connection with Wedding’s criminal enterprise. 

The others include: a female pimp accused of using her network of prostitutes to locate the witness Wedding wanted dead; the publisher of a now-defunct online Canadian media outlet called “The Dirty News” who allegedly accepted $10,000 from Wedding to post a photo of the witness so he could be “located and killed”; and a Laval hitman who allegedly gunned down the witness at a restaurant in Medellín, Colombia, last year. 

Four suspects, including Wedding, are still at large. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi says he’s hiding out in Mexico, where he’s being protected by the Sinaloa cartel. 

“He is currently the largest distributor of cocaine in Canada,” Bondi said Wednesday, adding that Wedding imports about 60 metric tons of cocaine into the U.S. via semitruck from Mexico every year, most of which is then smuggled into Canada through various networks. 

“60 metric tons is approximately the weight of 40 standard cars,” said Bondi. “Imagine that.” 

Wedding is on the FBI’s top-10 most-wanted list. The U.S. government is currently offering $15 million to anyone who can provide them with information leading to his

arrest. 

The 44-year-old from Thunder Bay is also accused of orchestrating four other murders in Ontario to expand his drug empire. 

Wedding represented Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics in the men's parallel giant slalom event. He finished in 24th place and quit snowboarding shortly after.