AI: 1)Young Canadians want AI companies to make their chatbots less addictive: report; 2) Tumbler Ridge families likely to seek US$1 billion in lawsuit against OpenAI: lawyer; 3)CAMP TECH May 1, 2025
Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press
By Anja Karadeglija, April 30, 2026
A new report focusing on the perspectives of young people says the government should order AI companies to take steps to curb the addictive aspects of their AI chatbots.
It’s one of a series of recommendations made by youth between the ages of 17 and 23 who took part in roundtables across the country.
The report says AI platforms should be required to “address the addictive design of AI chatbots by requiring measures such as content filters and optional data cache deletion, and explicitly providing users with the ability to determine levels of responsiveness and conversationality.”
The report was published by McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy on Thursday. Organizers held four consultation events between November 2025 and March 2026 and 100 young people took part.
Participants focused on four topics: AI chatbots, information integrity, data privacy and age assurance.
The report notes that the participants came of age with AI technology.
“In Toronto, participants reflected at length on the role of addictive design in AI chatbots. They argued that the sycophancy of many chatbot systems is intended to sustain interaction, cultivate dependency, and maximize time-on-platform,” it said.
The report says chatbots tend to reinforce users’ beliefs and emotional states and “generate the false experience of being understood.” It adds that those effects are the result of deliberate design choices made in the pursuit of profit.
“Several participants described their own experiences of cognitive off-loading or emotional reliance that they found difficult to reverse, and linked these dynamics to design choices they had never consented to,” the report says.
Among other recommendations, the report says social media platforms and search engines should be required to have easy options for opting out of integrated AI technologies.
It also calls for a new government body that could evaluate systems, audit algorithms and enforce safety standards.
Participants will hold an event to present the report and their recommendations on Parliament Hill on Thursday.
The federal government is working on separate pieces of legislation to address online privacy and online harms, and has also promised a national AI strategy.
The promised online harms bill could include age restrictions for access to social media, like the ban for those under 16 introduced in Australia last year. The government is also considering whether to include AI chatbots in any ban.
The report says the participants felt excluded from governance processes on digital issues.
“This was particularly salient in discussions of age assurance, where the vulnerability of children and young people is routinely invoked as a justification for regulatory intervention, yet young people themselves remain largely absent from the decision-making spaces where those interventions are designed,” the report says.
The report flagged privacy concerns around age verification technologies and called for a standardized age-verification system that would “restrict users’ access to generative AI platforms through the creation of an anonymized digital token system.”
2) Tumbler Ridge families likely to seek US$1 billion in lawsuit against OpenAI: lawyer
Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press
By Chuck Chiang, April 29, 2026.
An American lawyer representing some of the victims of the Tumbler Ridge, B.C., mass shooting says they will likely be seeking more than US$1 billion in their California legal action against OpenAI and its founder Sam Altman.
Chicago-based Jay Edelson has represented a number of clients in wrongful death cases against the artificial intelligence platform and founder Altman in the past year.
But Edelson said Wednesday that the Tumbler Ridge shootings in which eight victims were killed was the most egregious case his law firm had encountered, citing catastrophic injuries suffered by child plaintiff Maya Gebala.
The other plaintiffs include the parents of children killed in the attack and the husband of Shannda Aviugana-Durand, a teacher’s aide who was also shot dead.
“In terms of what we’re going to ask a jury, we think that when you look at Maya’s situation, for example — this 12-year-old girl who was shot at point-blank range and is fighting for her life — we expect that the jury is going to come back with a very strong message to OpenAI, and we’ll certainly be asking for more than a billion dollars,” Edelson said.
Eighteen-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar shot dead eight people on Feb. 10 before shooting herself, and it has since been revealed that OpenAI staff flagged the killer’s troubling interactions with the firm’s ChatGPT chatbot months earlier — but the company did not inform police.
In seven overlapping lawsuits, the Tumbler Ridge plaintiffs allege that in addition to their failure to warn authorities, OpenAI and Altman aided and abetted the shooting, among other allegations.
“So we’ve handled suicides that were coached by ChatGPT, a murder of an 83-year-old where a mentally ill man was brought into a conspiracy-laden world and was led to believe that his mother and others were trying to kill him, and he ended up killing her and himself,” Edelson said.
“And we’ve seen a number of cases where mass casualty events have been discussed and planned on platforms like ChatGPT and also Google Gemini. This case (Tumbler Ridge) is obviously the worst thing that we’ve encountered.”
Edelson is the American co-counsel for Tumbler Ridge victims and family members who filed the wrongful-death lawsuits in California against OpenAI and Altman on Wednesday.
OpenAI has not responded to a request for comment sent through social media platform X.
But in a statement released on its website on Tuesday OpenAI said it was “constantly improving the steps we take to help protect people and communities,” and that “mass shootings, threats against public officials, bombing attempts, and attacks on communities and individuals are an unacceptable and grave reality.”
In the lawsuits, the victims and their families allege OpenAI made a conscious decision not to notify police about Van Rootselaar’s activity, knowing that adding proper safety protocols to ChatGPT would cost the company market share.
The plaintiffs also allege that deactivating the shooter’s account was misleading because the company provided clear instructions to users on how to create new accounts.
OpenAI has said that Van Rootselaar had a second account, in addition to the one that was shut down.
“Those instructions were no accident,” the lawsuit said. “Neither were the missing safeguards. They are part of a pattern. After every tragedy, OpenAI promises to do better. But it never promises to do the one thing that would actually make a difference: stop ChatGPT from engaging with users about violence and self-harm in the first place.”
In a message shared by B.C. Premier David Eby last week, Altman apologized to victims, saying it was necessary despite words not being enough.
“I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June,” Altman said in the apology.
In a statement sent through the plaintiffs’ Canadian lawyers, Maya Gebala’s mother Cia Edmonds dismissed Altman’s apology.
“Did you use ChatGPT to draft your ‘apology,’ Sam?” Edmonds said in the statement. “It is empty, soulless, and lacks any human warmth. Only a machine could have put those words together and called it an apology.
“Tumbler Ridge sees your ‘apology,’ Sam. We do not accept it.”
Evan Solomon, the federal minister of artificial intelligence, told reporters that Ottawa is aware of the lawsuit, and the government but will be pursuing improvements in the AI field “to make sure that citizens are protected.”
“And as I said, all options are on the table,” Solomon said.
The plaintiffs’ Canadian lawyers, Rice Parsons Leoni & Elliott LLP, said they decided to pursue the lawsuits in California partially because of caps placed on damages for pain and suffering in Canadian courts, with the largest punitive damages award in Canadian history being $1.5 million.
“With respect to the murdered children, their estates are not permitted to bring claims in British Columbia for damages against OpenAI, and in most cases the loved ones of wrongfully killed children are unable to recover any recompense under British Columbia’s Family Compensation Act,” the firm says in a statement.
Edelson said that OpenAI has tried to slow down legal processes in past cases, and filing in California where witnesses are located will speed up the case.
OpenAI said in March that its latest round of funding valued the company at US$852 billion, and Edelson said the company may be worth in excess of US$1 trillion by the time a trial starts.
“We’re well aware that even if the jury does award a billion dollars, that’s not going to make a big dent on their financials,” Edelson added. “It will send a powerful statement, and the main goal of this lawsuit is to get OpenAI to take a dangerous product off market and to act responsibly.”
3)CAMP TECH May 1, 2025
• Did you know that ChatGPT can work directly inside your spreadsheets (in Excel or Google Sheets)? ChatGPT can work directly inside your spreadsheets It’s pretty great. You can ask ChatGPT to build full spreadsheets, get insights across tabs, add and edit formulas, and update sheets in real time. PS – Claude can do this too. https://zwdgzgl.clicks.mlsend.com/tl/c/eyJ2Ijoie1wiYVwiOjE5NTYwODIsXCJsXCI6MTg2Mjg4MzgzNjc4NDgyMzcyLFwiclwiOjE4NjI4ODM5Nzk0NTQwNzE2NX0iLCJzIjoiNmMxOGY1ZWM1MjM2YzcyOCJ9
• Camp Tech founder Avery Swartz was interviewed for an article in The Honest Talk about how women are still paying the price for AI – especially on social media. There are some good tips at the end.https://zwdgzgl.clicks.mlsend.com/tl/c/eyJ2Ijoie1wiYVwiOjE5NTYwODIsXCJsXCI6MTg2Mjg4MzgzNjkyMTEzODYzLFwiclwiOjE4NjI4ODM5Nzk0NTQwNzE2NX0iLCJzIjoiYjE1NDU1NTI1N2I4NjliZiJ9
• This is interesting: Gen Z turns to entrepreneurship as AI threatens entry-level jobs. The Guardian reports that some young workers are skipping traditional entry-level paths and using AI, low-code tools, freelancing, and startups to create their own opportunities. https://zwdgzgl.clicks.mlsend.com/tl/c/eyJ2Ijoie1wiYVwiOjE5NTYwODIsXCJsXCI6MTg2Mjg4MzgzNzA1NzQ1MzU0LFwiclwiOjE4NjI4ODM5Nzk0NTQwNzE2NX0iLCJzIjoiMGZkYjI4MjAxM2JiNDAwYiJ9
Fun Things to Click On – It’s a new month, so it’s time for a streaming roundup!
• New on Netflix Canada: May 2026
• New on Crave: May 2026
• New on Prime Video Canada: May 2026
• New on Disney+ Canada: May 2026
• New on Paramount+ Canada and Pluto TV: May 2026
Courtesy: Camp Tech, Toronto