This may well be the first defamation lawsuit filed against ChatGPT. While the chatbot incorrectly states that it has been in prison for corruption, an Australian mayor plans to file a complaint against OpenAI, which developed this generative AI.
Brian Hood, mayor of Hepburn Shire, 120 kilometers from Melbourne, was concerned when members of the public told him that ChatGPT was wrongly naming him as one of the culprits in a corruption scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s, reports Reuters.
Whistleblower instead of guilty
The chosen one worked well for this subsidiary, Note Printing Australia. But in reality, he himself notified the authorities about bribing foreign officials to obtain contracts, and was never charged with any felony or misdemeanor.
Its lawyers sent a letter to OpenAI on March 21 indicating that the company had 28 days to repair these errors, on pain of a defamation lawsuit – whose compensation can reach up to 400,000 Australian dollars (about 246,000 euros). The letter has so far remained unanswered.
“This could be a historic moment because it would be about applying defamation law to this new area of artificial intelligence and publishing in the computer space,” James Naughton, a lawyer at Hood’s firm Gordon Legal, told Reuters.
According to Naughton, the elected official relied on an immaculate reputation, so he “cares that his constituents can access this information.”
This case adds to the list of “hallucinations”, that is, information manufactured by generative AIs, which have been reported everywhere. Recently, an American law professor told the Washington Post that ChatGPT wrongly accused him of sexual harassment of one of his students.
Source: BFM TV
