American radio host Mark Walters has filed a suit against OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, after the chatbot wrongly named him as a defendant in a criminal case. Decrypt reported this, citing the plaintiff’s lawyer John Monroe.
According to court materials, journalist Fred Reil requested from ChatGPT a brief summary of the precedent-setting embezzlement case The Second Amendment Foundation против Роберта Фергюсона, providing the URL of the document. In the generated response, the bot wrongly named Mark Walters as a defendant, attributing to him charges of fraud and misappropriation for personal use.
However, in reality the radio host is not a party to the case and has never worked for the mentioned organization.
“OpenAI has libelled my client and fabricated outrageous lies about him,” Monroe said, explaining that filing the complaint was the only way to defend Walters’s honour.
The plaintiff in the original complaint, Alan Gottlieb, also confirmed that ChatGPT’s statement was false.
Walters is seeking penalties and damages from OpenAI in an unspecified amount.
Monroe’s lawyer is confident of victory, but not everyone shares his view. Cal Evans, the in-house counsel at Stonehouse Technology Group, noted that, as in most defamation actions, the plaintiff will have to prove the damage.
“In the suit, ‘hallucinations’ are mentioned, but we must understand that this communication is not with a person, but with software that cross-references information from the Internet and conveys it,” Evans said.
AI ‘hallucinations’ refer to cases where it generates incorrect results not supported by real data.
OpenAI’s disclaimer is posted in the ChatGPT interface. It warns that the chatbot “may provide inaccurate information about people, places or facts.”
Evans believes OpenAI could use this approach to build a defence in court, since ChatGPT draws information from open sources already published on the Internet.
Earlier Forklog reported that the attorney at the law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman faces a penalty for using ChatGPT in preparing documents for the client’s case.