A Norwegian man said he was horrified to discover that ChatGPT outputs had falsely accused him of murdering his own children.
According to a complaint filed Thursday by European Union digital rights advocates Noyb, Arve Hjalmar Holmen decided to see what information ChatGPT might provide if a user searched his name. He was shocked when ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as “a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son,” a Noyb press release said.
Seems to me libel would require AI to have credibility, which it does not.
It’s a tool. Like most useful tools it can do harmful things. We know almost nothing about the provenance of this output. It could have been poisoned either accidentally or deliberately.
But above all, the problem is ignorant people believing the output of AI is truth. It’s pretty good at some things, but the more esoteric the knowledge, the less reliable it is. It’s best to treat AI as a storyteller. Yeah there are a lot of facts in there but when they don’t serve the story they can be embellished. I don’t see the harm in just acknowledging that and moving on.
Meanwhile, AI vendors:
“AI will soon be the only way we access information and make decisions!”
and those marketers should get punished, not for spreading misinformation but for being marketers.