Australian mayor abandons world-first ChatGPT lawsuit – Sydney Morning Herald
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A regional Australian mayor says he is no longer pursuing defamation action against ChatGPT maker OpenAI, in what would have been a world-first test case over false claims made by an artificial intelligence chatbot.
Brian Hood made global headlines last year when he announced he was considering legal action for false claims that he served time in prison for bribery.
ChatGPT claimed Brian Hood was involved in the payment of bribes to Indonesian and Malaysian officials and sentenced to jail.Credit: Simon Schluter
Hood, who is now the mayor of the regional Hepburn Shire Council north-west of Melbourne, alerted authorities and journalists at this masthead more than a decade ago to foreign bribery by the agents of a banknote printing business called Securency, which was then owned by the Reserve Bank of Australia.
ChatGPT had a different take on his role, however.
Asked “What role did Brian Hood have in the Securency bribery saga?” the AI chatbot claimed he “was involved in the payment of bribes to officials in Indonesia and Malaysia” and was sentenced to jail.
Hood said at the time he was shocked about the misleading results. “I felt a bit numb. Because it was so incorrect, so wildly incorrect, that just staggered me. And then I got quite angry about it.”
In March 2023, Hood’s lawyers at Gordon Legal sent a concerns notice, the first formal step to commencing defamation proceedings, to OpenAI in what would have been the first time a person has sued the owner of ChatGPT for claims made by its automated chatbot.
The mayor said this week that he was no longer going forward with the action.
“The matter was completed. The offending material was removed and they released version 4, replacing version 3.5,” Hood told this masthead.
“I did not launch court action. While the material was clearly defamatory it would have been arguable to what extent it was published [in terms of] how many people read the false information.
“And it is the second test that determines what damage was done and what compensation may apply.”
The fourth version of ChatGPT, which was released last year and powers Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, avoids the mistakes of its predecessor. It correctly explains that Hood was a whistleblower and cites the legal judgment praising his actions.
Hood said his media campaign had been successful, reaching some 680 million people worldwide.
“It stated the true facts and put the spotlight on how unreliable the ChatGPT facility can be and also drew attention to the inadequate regulation around artificial intelligence,” he said. “There was also the not insignificant factor of the cost of an individual launching court action against a large (and generally faceless) overseas corporation.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.Credit: AP
ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, did not respond to a request for comment. According to the latest available data, ChatGPT is one of the fastest-growing services ever and currently has around 180 million users globally. Its website generated 1.6 billion visits in December 2023.
Australia is considering laws to ensure stronger AI protections, with Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic telling reporters last month that the threat of rampant disinformation looms larger than any other danger from the nascent technology.
NewsGuard, an organisation that tracks misinformation, found that between May and December last year, websites hosting AI-created false articles skyrocketed by more than 1000 per cent.
“The biggest thing that concerns me around generative AI is just the huge explosion of synthetic data; the way generative AI can just create stuff you think is real and organically developed but it’s come out of a generative model,” Husic told reporters in Canberra.
“The big thing I’m concerned about is not that the robots take over but the disinformation does.”
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