
In what would be the first defamation action against the automated messaging service, a regional Australian mayor claimed he may sue OpenAI if it does not retract ChatGPT’s erroneous allegations that he had served time in prison for bribery.
A member of the public informed Brian Hood, who was elected mayor of Hepburn Shire, 120 kilometers northwest of Melbourne, last November, that ChatGPT had wrongly implicated him in a foreign bribery scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s. This caused him to worry about his reputation.
Although Hood did work for the subsidiary, Note Printing Australia, he was the one who alerted law enforcement to payments of bribery to foreign officials in order to gain currency printing contracts and, according to his attorneys, was never charged with a crime.
On March 21, the lawyers allegedly wrote a letter of complaint to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, giving it 28 days to correct the mistakes about their client or risk being subjected to a potential defamation action.
The attorneys said that San Francisco-based OpenAI had not yet responded to Hood’s legal letter. An email sent by Reuters after business hours received no response from OpenAI.
Hood’s lawsuit, if it proceeds, would likely be the first time a person had brought legal action against ChatGPT’s creator over claims made by the artificial intelligence tool since it was introduced last year. In February, Microsoft Corp. included ChatGPT in its Bing search engine.
A Microsoft official could not be reached for comment right away.
According to James Naughton, a lawyer at Hood’s law company Gordon Legal, “It would potentially be a landmark event in that it’s extending this defamation legislation to a new area of artificial intelligence and publication in the IT sector.”
His reputation is essential to his job as an elected person, according to Naughton. Hood relies on a public record to expose corporate wrongdoing, thus it matters to him if members of his community have access to this information.
Defamation damages awards in Australia are typically capped at about A$400,000 ($269,360). Hood did not know the precise number of persons who had accessed the false material about him, which is a factor in determining the settlement amount. But, Naughton noted that given the seriousness of the defamatory comments, Hood may be able to recover more than A$200,000.
Hood would accuse ChatGPT of giving users a false impression of truth by leaving out footnotes if it brought a lawsuit, according to Naughton.
It’s quite challenging for someone to ask, “How does the algorithm come up with that answer?” Naughton remarked. It is extremely opaque.