If me asking "how do I make cocaine", and getting a refusal from ChatGPT, as if that's what was stopping me from becoming the next Pablo Escobar, is considered damning, in a court of law, and a jury of my peers, I need a better lawyer.
It would not be "damning" - as in you won't be convicted as a drug lord based on that alone - but search histories had been used, many times, in a court of law as evidence supporting intent, knowledge and other details of the crime. So if you are caught in a cocaine lab holding a bag of cocaine, then in the following process asking ChatGPT on how to make it would be used as part of the proof you were interested in making cocaine and eventually made it.
in that context, sure. what worries me is a dragnet where the government data mines everyone and suddenly I'm getting jammed up in court just because happened to be in the wrong location when I asked ChatGPT how to make cocaine
The police doesn't have the resources now to go after the people who openly offer drugs on the street to any takers now. The chance they'd randomly choose to focus on you because of a random search query is very low. The chance that if you cross them in some other way and attract their attention, they could use data mining to get you in trouble is substantial, that's a different scenario though.
