ChatGPT Sued for Lying

An anonymous readers shared this report from the Washington Post:

Brian Hood is a whistleblower who was praised for "showing tremendous courage" when he helped expose a worldwide bribery scandal linked to Australia's National Reserve Bank. But if you ask ChatGPT about his role in the scandal, you get the opposite version of events. Rather than heralding Hood's whistleblowing role, ChatGPT falsely states that Hood himself was convicted of paying bribes to foreign officials, had pleaded guilty to bribery and corruption, and been sentenced to prison.

When Hood found out, he was shocked. Hood, who is now mayor of Hepburn Shire near Melbourne in Australia, said he plans to sue the company behind ChatGPT for telling lies about him, in what could be the first defamation suit of its kind against the artificial intelligence chatbot.... "There's never, ever been a suggestion anywhere that I was ever complicit in anything, so this machine has completely created this thing from scratch," Hood said — confirming his intention to file a defamation suit against ChatGPT. "There needs to be proper control and regulation over so-called artificial intelligence, because people are relying on them...."

If it proceeds, Hood's lawsuit will be the first time someone filed a defamation suit against ChatGPT's content, according to Reuters. If it reaches the courts, the case would test uncharted legal waters, forcing judges to consider whether the operators of an artificial intelligence bot can be held accountable for its allegedly defamatory statements.

The article notes that ChatGPT prominently warns users that it "may occasionally generate incorrect information." And another Post article notes that all the major chatbots now include disclaimers, "such as Bard's fine-print message below each query: 'Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn't represent Google's views.'"

But the Post also notes that ChatGPT still "invented a fake sexual harassment story involving a real law professor, Jonathan Turley — citing a Washington Post article that did not exist as its evidence." Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 tipped us off to that story. But here's what happened when the Washington Post searched for accountability for the error:


In a statement, OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix said, "When users sign up for ChatGPT, we strive to be as transparent as possible that it may not always generate accurate answers. Improving factual accuracy is a significant focus for us, and we are making progress...." Katy Asher, senior communications director at Microsoft, said the company is taking steps to ensure search results are safe and accurate. "We have developed a safety system including content filtering, operational monitoring, and abuse detection to provide a safe search experience for our users," Asher said in a statement, adding that "users are also provided with explicit notice that they are interacting with an AI system."

But it remains unclear who is responsible when artificial intelligence generates or spreads inaccurate information. From a legal perspective, "we just don't know" how judges might rule when someone tries to sue the makers of an AI chatbot over something it says, said Jeff Kosseff, a professor at the Naval Academy and expert on online speech. "We've not had anything like this before."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.