An Australian provincial mayor threatened to sue OpenAI if ChatGPT did not retract its erroneous statements that he served time in prison for bribery.
When members of the public told Brian Hood, mayor of Hepburn Shire, 120km (75 miles) northwest of Melbourne, that 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, he became concerned about his reputation.
Hood worked for Note Printing Australia, but his defenders say he reported bribery to foreign officials to gain currency printing contracts and was never prosecuted.
On March 21, the attorneys wrote to ChatGPT owner OpenAI, giving them 28 days to remedy the mistakes regarding their client or risk a defamation action.
The attorneys stated San Francisco-based OpenAI hadn’t responded to Hood’s legal letter. In addition, OpenAI ignored Reuters’ after-hours email.
Hood’s lawsuit would be the first against ChatGPT’s owner for promises made by the artificial language software, which has proven enormously popular since its inception last year. Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) incorporated ChatGPT into Bing in February. A Microsoft official was unavailable for comment.
“That would possibly be a watershed moment in the sense that it’s applying this defamation legislation to a new area of artificial intelligence and publication in the IT sphere,” Hood’s Gordon Law partner James Naughton told Reuters.
“His reputation is key,” Naughton added. Hood was known for exposing corporate wrongdoing, “therefore, it makes a difference to him whether individuals in his neighborhood are obtaining this stuff.”
Australian defamation damages are typically restricted to A$400,000 ($269,360). Hood did not know how many individuals had viewed the false material about him, which determined the award sum. Still, Naughton said the defamatory comments were significant enough to claim more than A$200,000.
Naughton said Hood would sue ChatGPT for misleading users by omitting footnotes.
“How does the algorithm come up with that answer?” Naughton asked. “Very opaque.”
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