ChatGPT incorrectly described Brian Hood, the mayor of Hepburn Shire Council in the Australian state of Victoria, as a guilty party in a bribery scandal, Australia's ABC News reported.
The scandal centered on how Note Printing Australia, a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia, had paid bribes to foreign officials to win contracts to print currencies between 1999 and 2004.
While Hood had worked at Note Printing Australia, he was actually a whistleblower, and a judge at the Supreme Court of Victoria said that he had played a "very important role" in exposing the bribery.
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Hood said that after someone alerted him to the results on ChatGPT, he tried it out himself.
"It told me that I'd been charged with very serious criminal offenses, that I'd been convicted of them, and that I'd spent 30 months in jail," he told ABC News.
Hood said he'd sent OpenAI a concerns notice on March 21, giving the company 28 days to respond.
James Naughton, a partner at Gordon Law, which is representing Hood, told Reuters that if he filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT, it would accuse the platform of creating a false sense of accuracy by not including references to the sources it used.
Hood told ABC News it was all the more "disturbing" because ChatGPT got some details correct. However, the information about his own involvement was "completely wrong," he said. "I was horrified – I was stunned at first that it was so incorrect."
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