ChatGPT sued: Australian Mayor to sue OpenAI in world’s first defamation lawsuit against AI

There have been a lot of questions about OpenAI’s ChatGPT and how it selects the information that it does, and what sources it looks for. Because of this, it has often been able to pass off things that it made up, without any concern for what damages its responses may cause. 

In what would be the first defamation case against a generative AI bot, a rural Australian mayor said that he is planning to sue OpenAI if it does not rectify ChatGPT’s bogus claims that he spent time in jail for bribes.

Accusations of a bribery scandal
Brian Hood, the mayor of Hepburn Shire, 120 kilometres northwest of Melbourne, became concerned about his reputation after members of the public informed him that ChatGPT had falsely named him as a guilty party in a foreign bribery scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s.

Hood did work for the subsidiary, Note Printing Australia, but he was the one who alerted authorities to the payment of bribes to foreign officials in order to secure money printing contracts, according to his attorneys.

ChatGPT’s OpenAI sent a notice
On March 21, the attorneys said they sent a letter of concern to ChatGPT owner OpenAI, giving OpenAI 28 days to correct the mistakes about their client or risk a potential slander case.

According to the lawyers, OpenAI, located in San Francisco, had not yet replied to Hood’s legal missive. Out of work hours, OpenAI did not reply to a comment request.

If Hood sues, it will most likely be the first time someone has sued the proprietor of ChatGPT for claims made by the automatic language product, which has grown in popularity since its debut last year. In February, Microsoft Corp incorporated ChatGPT into its search engine Bing.

“It could be a watershed moment in terms of applying defamation law to a new area of artificial intelligence and publication in the IT space,” said James Naughton, an associate at Hood’s law company Gordon Legal.

“He’s an elected official, and his reputation is important to his job,” Naughton explained. Hood depended on a public record of exposing corporate wrongdoing, “so it matters to him if people in his community are accessing this material.”

Limited damages in defamation suits
Penalties for defamation cases in Australia are typically limited to $400,000 or US$269,360. Hood did not know the precise number of people who had viewed the fake information about him, which determined the payment amount, but the nature of the libellous comments was severe enough that he could claim more than $200,000, according to Naughton.

If Hood initiates a lawsuit, it will charge ChatGPT of misleading customers by neglecting to include footnotes, according to Naughton.

“It’s very difficult for someone to look behind that and say, ‘How does the algorithm come up with that answer?'” Naughton explained. “It’s very fuzzy.”

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