MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: An Australian regional mayor has said he may sue OpenAI, parent company of ChatGPT, over claims the automated text service falsely labelled him a criminal.
Brian Hood, the mayor of Hepburn Shire – an area about two hours’ drive northwest of Melbourne – sent a legal notice to the creators of the AI-powered chatbot last month after the web app wrongly implicated him in a bribery and corruption scandal – a crime he actually exposed.
“I was horrified; I was stunned at first that it was so incorrect,” Hood told Australia’s national broadcaster on Thursday.
He said his friends and colleagues alerted him to the “disturbing” results from the app.
He said, “It is one thing to get something a little bit wrong; it’s entirely something else to accuse someone of being a criminal and having served jail time when the truth was the exactly the opposite.”
Before taking office as the mayor of Hepburn Shire, Hood had helped expose bribery and other crimes at his former employer, Note Printing Australia, by notifying authorities about payment of bribes to foreign officials. His action lead to criminal charges against several people.
But when ChatGPT was asked about the case and Hood’s role, it falsely identified him as a guilty a party and even claimed he had been jailed for corruption, his lawyers stated.
Hood said he had yet to receive a response from the app’s owners after his lawyers issued a legal notice on March 21 demanding the correction of ChatGPT’s false claims to avoid court action.
ChatGPT’s information damaged Hood’s reputation: lawyer
Hood’s lawyer, James Naughton from Gordon Legal said the information supplied by ChatGPT was defamatory and had damaged the mayor’s reputation.
OpenAI has not yet responded to a request for comment, but its chatbot does have a disclaimer warning that it “may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts”.
If Hood sues OpenAI, it would likely be the first time a person has sued the owner of ChatGPT for claims made by the automated language app which has gained massive popularity since its launch last year. —AFP
