UK Edition
An Australian mayor has threatened to sue the creator of ChatGPT after the artificial intelligence chatbot claimed he had served time in prison for bribery.
Brian Hood, the mayor of the Shire of Hepburn in Victoria, said he had been falsely accused of playing a part in a banking bribery scandal when working for Australia’s central bank.
He has sent a letter of concern to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in a legal step that could lead to a defamation case.
If it proceeds, it would be the first such case against the chatbot, which has become a viral sensation for its ability to answer questions and look up information with human-sounding answers.
Mr Hood had worked at a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia when he blew the whistle on a bribery scandal at banknote printing company Securency.
However, when asked about his role, ChatGPT responded that Hood had been charged with bribery offences in 2012 and pleaded guilty, serving more than two years in prison.
“According to ChatGPT, I was one of the offenders, that I got charged with all sorts of serious criminal offences. I was never charged with anything,” Mr Hood told ABC Australia.
ChatGPT has exploded in popularity since its launch in November and is widely used as a writing tool and to look up information. The technology is being integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine, while Google has released a rival chatbot called Bard.
The bots are trained on huge quantities of online data from sources such as Wikipedia. However, the services have been prone to “hallucination”, in which they confidently assert facts that are not based on any source.
ChatGPT’s website includes disclaimers that the service “may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts”. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The company has 28 days to respond to Mr Hood’s legal request.
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, said this week that ChatGPT had claimed that he had been accused of sexual harassment on a trip to Alaska that had never taken place in a Washington Post newspaper article that did not exist.