We’re already starting to see the effects of asking an AI to create written content and posting it online. By far not the first, but the first to make the most headway is this case coming out of Australia. The Mayor of Hepburn Shire Council, Brian Hood, says he intends to sue OpenAi, the creators of ChatGPT for defamation.
He says the tool falsely claimed he was imprisoned for bribery while working for a subsidiary of the Australian national bank. In fact, Mr Hood was a whistleblower at the bank and was never charged with a crime concerning the incident.
The first formal step of a defamation case in Australia has been taken: concerns notice sent to OpenAI by Hood’s lawyers. The company then has 28 days to replay, which is when Mr Hood will be able to take OpenAI to court, marking the first time that the company has publicly faced a defamation suit over ChatGPT content.
As explained by the BBC: “The BBC was able to confirm Mr Hood’s claims by asking the publicly available version of ChatGPT on OpenAI’s website about the role he had in the Securency scandal. It responded with a description of the case, then inaccurately stated that he ‘pleaded guilty to one count of bribery in 2012 and was sentenced to four years in prison’.
“But the same result does not appear in the newer version of ChatGPT which is integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It correctly identifies him as a whistleblower, and specifically says he ‘was not involved in the payment of bribes… as claimed by an AI chatbot called ChatGPT’.”
