OpenAI’s ChatGPT could face its first defamation lawsuit from an Australian mayor who said he may sue the company if it does not correct the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot’s false claims that he had served time in prison for bribery.
Brian Hood, who is the mayor of Hepburn Shire located 120 kilometres (75 miles) northwest of Melbourne, said ChatGPT had falsely named him as a guilty party in a foreign bribery scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s, according to a Reuters report.
Hood did work for the subsidiary, Note Printing Australia, but he was the whistleblower who alerted authorities about the payment of bribes to foreign officials to win currency printing contracts. Hood was never charged with a crime, his lawyers were quoted as saying.
“Brian Hood’s reputation as a morally upstanding whistleblower has been defamed by ChatGPT, which incorrectly represented him as an individual responsible for illegally bribing foreign officials," James Naughton, a partner at Hood's law firm Gordon Legal, was quoted as saying.
“This critical error is an eye-opening example of the reputational harm that can be caused by AI systems such as ChatGPT, which has been shown in this case to give inaccurate and unreliable answers disguised as fact.”
Hood's lawyers sent a letter of concern to ChatGPT’s owner OpenAI on March 21 giving the company 28 days to correct the chatbot’s claims or face a defamation lawsuit. OpenAI is yet to respond to the letter, the lawyers were quoted as saying.
"It would potentially be a landmark moment in the sense that it's applying this defamation law to a new area of AI and publication in the IT space,” Naughton was reported as saying.
“As AI becomes increasingly integrated into our society, the accuracy of the information provided by these services will come under close legal scrutiny.”
Contact the author at emily.jarvie@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow her on Twitter @emilyjjarvie