ChatGPT-creator OpenAI could potentially face its first ever lawsuit after a regional Australian mayor threatened to sue the platform over false information.
Specifically, ChatGPT claimed that Brian Hood, who became the mayor of Hepburn Shire in November last year, had been imprisoned for bribery, which he denies.
Hood’s lawyers have sent a letter to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, requesting that the error be corrected within 28 days or face legal proceedings for defamation.
If Hood does sue, it would be the first such case against ChatGPT, which has grown in popularity since its launch last year and was recently integrated into Microsoft’s search engine Bing.
According to his lawyers, Hood was alerted by members of the public that ChatGPT had wrongly implicated him in a foreign bribery scandal related to a Reserve Bank of Australia subsidiary in the early 2000s.
While Hood did work for the subsidiary, Note Printing Australia, his lawyers assert that he actually reported the payment of bribes to foreign officials to win currency printing contracts, and he was never charged with any wrongdoing.
James Naughton, a partner at Gordon Legal, the law firm representing Brian Hood, pointed out that a successful defamation lawsuit against ChatGPT would be a significant development because it would extend defamation law to a new area of artificial intelligence and publication in the IT industry.
Naughton explained that Hood’s reputation is essential to his position as an elected official, and he has a history of exposing corporate misconduct, making it crucial that any false information be corrected. Therefore, if people in Hood’s community are accessing incorrect information about him, it could have a detrimental impact on his ability to perform his job effectively.
Last week, over 1,000 petitioners, including AI experts, technologists, and business leaders such as Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk have called for a “pause” on developing AI systems that exceed the capabilities of GPT-4.
The petition noted that AI labs are locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that “no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”
