An Australian mayor is considering taking legal action against OpenAI for an artificial intelligence (AI) platform, ChatGPT, making false claims that he had been jailed for bribery. Brian Hood, the mayor of Hepburn Shire Council in the Australian state of Victoria, was actually a whistleblower, but ChatGPT incorrectly described him as a guilty party in a bribery scandal.
Hood had worked at Note Printing Australia, a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia, which had been accused of paying bribes to foreign officials to win contracts to print currencies between 1999 and 2004. However, a judge at the Supreme Court of Victoria said that he had played a “very important role” in exposing the bribery. After becoming aware of the false claims, Hood tried the ChatGPT platform himself and it resulted in ChatGPT telling him that he’d been charged with criminal offenses and had served 30 months in jail.
Hood’s legal team, Gordon Legal, said that a potential lawsuit would accuse ChatGPT of creating a false sense of accuracy by not including references to the sources it used. It is also noted that the small disclaimer found on ChatGPT’s website is “nowhere near adequate,” based on Hood’s opinion.
OpenAI is a technology company backed by Microsoft that has developed programs such as GPT-2 and GPT-3 in the fields of natural language processing and generative AI. Their AI technology has the capability to excessively “hallucinate” and make up facts about people and places, which has resulted in harmful and false information being published.
It is important to note that artificial intelligence still has a long way to go when it comes to delivering accurate and informative content. AI platforms such as ChatGPT are continuously created in an effort to make this technology more reliable, but this incident is a stark reminder that it may be too soon to trust these systems yet.
