Australian mayor prepares to sue ChatGPT for defamation

Brian Hood, who was elected mayor of Hepburn Shire, 120km from Melbourne, in November last year, has had his reputation questioned after ChatGPT named him as a suspect in a foreign bribery scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s.

Photo: Illustration

Mr Hood worked for subsidiary Note Printing Australia, but was the one who informed authorities about bribing foreign officials to win banknote printing contracts and was never charged, his lawyers said.

The lawyers said they sent a letter of concern to ChatGPT owner OpenAI on March 21, giving OpenAI 28 days to correct the misrepresentations or face a defamation lawsuit.

OpenAI, based in San Francisco, has not yet responded to Hood’s legal letter, lawyers said. If Hood were to sue, it would be the first time someone has sued ChatGPT’s owner over content generated by its now-ubiquitous artificial intelligence model.

Microsoft also integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine in February. “This could be a watershed moment in the sense that it’s applying this defamation law to a new area of ​​artificial intelligence,” James Naughton, a partner at Gordon Legal, Hood, told Reuters.

Libel damages in Australia are typically capped at around A$400,000 ($269,360). Hood did not know exactly how many people had accessed the false information about him – a factor in determining the amount of the fine – but the nature of the defamatory statements was serious enough that he could seek A$200,000, Naughton said.

The lawsuit would also tarnish ChatGPT's reputation for potentially misleading users by not including citations in its responses. "It's hard for someone to know what's behind the information it's giving and understand how the algorithm came up with that answer? It's very opaque," Naughton said.

Hoang Hai (according to Reuters)

Source: https://www.congluan.vn/mot-thi-truong-cua-uc-chuan-bi-kien-chatgpt-ve-toi-phi-bang-post242417.html