An Australian local council mayor may be at the forefront of a landmark legal battle against AI platform ChatGPT, as he considers suing the service for defamation.
Brian Wood, the mayor of Hepburn Shire in Victoria, discovered that ChatGPT was falsely claiming that he had been imprisoned for a bribery scandal. Despite blowing the whistle on a bribery case involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia over a decade ago, ChatGPT was incorrectly reporting that Wood had pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a foreign official and served jail time for it.
Wood's legal representative, Gordon Legal, has stated the mayor could claim more than $200,000 in damages and that it could be a landmark moment in applying defamation law to artificial intelligence and publication in the IT space. “He’s an elected official, his reputation is central to his role,” said Gordon Legal lawyer James Naughton.
ChatGPT has been criticised for providing a "false sense of accuracy" and for being opaque in its workings. The service's terms of use include warnings about potentially inaccurate information, and it has already been temporarily banned in Italy due to data privacy and inaccuracy concerns. While evaluating the accuracy of any information produced by machine learning is important, the situation highlights the need for more transparency and accountability in AI algorithms.
iTWire notes that any attempts to ask the service "who is Brian Hood" are now met with an error, consistently, as...
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