OpenAI’s revolutionary chatbot ChatGPT is nearly as famous for its breathtaking speed (and seeming intelligence) as for its preponderance of mistakes. Now those mistakes are starting to have real-world ramifications. Take the case of Brian Hood, mayor of Hepburn Shire town, north of Melbourne in Australia, who is considering suing OpenAI for defamation after his constituents started telling him that ChatGPT accused him of serving prison time for bribery, Reuters reported Wednesday. In fact, Hood claims that not only has he never been in prison but he was the whistleblower who flagged the bribery in the first place.
“He’s an elected official, his reputation is central to his role,” James Naughton, a partner at Gordon Legal, which is representing Hood, told Reuters. “It would potentially be a landmark moment in the sense that it’s applying this defamation law to a new area of artificial intelligence and publication in the IT space.”
The mayor was told about ChatGPT misfiring accusations by the public, after the OpenAI chatbot claimed that Hood was among those found guilty in a bribery case that took place between 1999 and 2004 which involved an entity of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Note Printing Australia. It was quite the reverse: Yes, Hood worked at Note Printing Australia, but his lawyers say he was actually the one who flagged the bribes to foreign authorities and he was not charged with the crime himself. Now Hood says he’s worried about his name being tarnished if...
On 30 April 2026, DOJ announced a new anti-fraud initiative: the Fraud Oversight through Careful Use of Statistics (FOCUS) initiative. The FOCUS initiative is intended to strengthen DOJ’s working ...