ChatGPT has been blamed on everything from embarrassing moments to having to argue to a judge why he shouldn’t impose sanctions on you. But it is a lot rarer to hear about ChatGPT being taken to court. One AI hallucination error looks a little too much like accusing an innocent man of murder. The case is centering the importance of privacy laws in a rapidly moving and fact-check light world. PC Gamer has coverage:
A Norwegian man called Arve Hjalmar Holmen recently struck up a conversation with ChatGPT to see what information OpenAI’s chatbot would offer when he typed in his own name. He was horrified when ChatGPT allegedly spun a yarn falsely claiming he’d killed his own sons and been sentenced to 21 years in prison. The creepiest aspect? Around the story of the made up crime, ChatGPT included some accurate, identifiable details about Holman’s personal life, such as the number and gender of his children, as well as the name of his home town.
Large language models are like autocorrect’s much beefier and better-at-data-aggregating cousin. Despite how often it can seem that ChatGPT or similar LLMs are correctly answering the questions posed to them, the results — much like with autocorrect — can also feel a lot like your computer correcting the word “duck” to “duck” when you really wanted to say “duck.” The response to Holmen’s question may have just been the fruit of an extremely low probability, but the fact that it looks like someone using personal information to make their defamatory claims look more realistic is terrifying. It is bad enough that we have fake news coming from humans, but the prospect of easily accessible AI that can throw dirt on anyone’s name is a burden no one should have to bear. The threat of litigation could be enough, at least initially, to shed some light on the black box processes that spit out reputation harming nonsense like this.
Noyb, a privacy rights group, took interest in Holmen’s case and filed complaints to get the personal information that OpenAI may have used for Holmen scrubbed from its data reserves. But they’re doing so under GDPR. Lefty states like California may have things like the California Consumer Privacy Act to protect their citizens’ information online, but many states are far behind when it comes to privacy protections and enforcement mechanisms. Does it inspire tee-hees when Grok decides to name Elon Musk as the greatest spreader of misinformation and a Russian asset? Yes. But what if a quick re-figuring of the black box makes it easy for Musk or one of his big-ball lackeys to farm misinformation using AI without consequence? Not so tee-hee.
ChatGPT Faces Legal Complaint After A User Inputted Their Own Name And Found It Accused Them Of Made-Up Crimes [PC Gamer]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.