ChatGPT can be sued for defamation for fabricating the mayor’s criminal past

An Australian mayor plans to sue ChatGPT for defamation if OpenAI does not rectify the situation after the program awarded him a criminal past and time behind bars for corruption.

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The Guardian reported Thursday that this will be the first-ever defamation lawsuit against the automated scripts.

Last November, Brian Hood, the mayor of Hepburn Shire, located northwest of Melbourne in Australia, learned that the program had portrayed him as one of the perpetrators in a corruption scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s.

According to the show, the mayor has served time in jail for his fake crime. It was members of the public who approached him to tell him that AI was dragging his name through the mud.

Because if he was indeed implicated in the scandal, it was because he was the one who would have tipped off the authorities to pay bribes to foreign officials in exchange for contracts, his lawyers would have pointed out to him according to British media.

“It’s really hard for someone to look behind all this and say ‘How did the algorithm come up with this answer?'” It’s really opaque,” said James Naughton, partner at law firm Gordon Legal.

If the error has not been corrected after 28 days, he plans to move forward with a lawsuit and claim the equivalent of roughly $180,000.