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6.3: Case Study- AI Defamation

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    207244
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    As covered in my article on truth and academic integrity, Artificial intelligence has the potential to generate false information, leading to serious privacy concerns. In a recent case in Hepburn Shire, Australia, OpenAI once again faces the possibility of legal action for defamation. ChatGPT incorrectly described regional mayor Brian Hood as a guilty party in a foreign bribery scandal. The mayor was actually a whistle-blower who had reported the bribe payments.

    ChatGPT’s errors arose from its indiscriminate data-scraping, as well as the inability of these models to distinguish between true and false claims. As a result, it generated convincing but incorrect information. Although OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, has taken some steps to protect people’s privacy, such as removing personal information from training data, such actions may not be sufficient to prevent the spread of false information.

    This case highlights the legal challenges associated with suing AI companies for defamation, particularly given the issue of jurisdiction. Although the legal implications of AI technologies like ChatGPT are still uncharted, the case demonstrates the need for more cooperative efforts between AI developers, social media companies, and government agencies to mitigate the risk of generating misleading information.

    When personal user data – even publicly available data, like the original news story about Brian Hood’s involvement in the bribery case – is combined with a language model’s capacity for generating falsehoods, we have a recipe for damaging output.


    6.3: Case Study- AI Defamation is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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