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.
this is confusing. did you think I meant you’re engaging in libel against llms or something? that’s the only way I can make sense of your reply.
Really?
I read your reply as saying the output is (can be) libellous - which it cannot be because it is not based on a dataset which resolves to anything absolute.
Maybe we’re just missing each other - struggling to parse each others’ output. ;)
well I must be missing something because all I’m getting is that you’re saying it’s full of shit as a defense against libel.
So maybe we’re kinda staring at two sides of the same coin. Because yeah, you’re not misrepresentin my point.
But wait there’s a deeper point I’ve been trying to make.
You’re right that I am also saying it’s all bullshit - even when it’s “right”. And the fact we’d consider artificially generated, completely made up text libellous indicates to me that we (as a larger society) have failed to understand how these tools work. If anyone takes what they say to be factual they are mistaken.
If our feelings are hurt because a “make shit up machine” makes shit up… well we’re holding the phone wrong.
My point is that we’ve been led to believe they are something more concrete, more exact, more stable, much more factual than they are — and that is worth challenging and holding these companies to account for. i hope cases like these are a forcing function for that.
That’s it. Hopefully my PoV is clearer (not saying it’s right).
Technically, in some jurisdictions a person who is widely known to be unreliable is harder to sue for libel precisely because the likelihood of reputational injury is lower if nobody actually believes the claim.
yeah but the companies pushing the ai themselves are definitely not marketing it as unreliable, otherwise it wouldn’t have any purpose. they knowingly push these as actual ways to find out information while putting tiny disclaimers that things might not be accurate to avoid liability which shouldn’t hold up in any sane court.