The mayor of an Australian town has threatened to file the first lawsuit against OpenAI, the company that owns the popular chatbot ChatGPT, if it does not correct the false claims of the tool, which falsely claims that it was sentenced to prison for bribery, reports ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’. If it goes ahead, it would become the first complaint against the automated text service using artificial intelligence, which could help to see if the technology companies behind these tools have any responsibility for the results they offer.
The claim would be filed by Brian Hood, mayor of the town of Hepburn Shire since last November. Specifically, the OpenAI-owned tool would be explaining to users who use the service that the representative was sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2011 for bribing foreign officials. The reality is Hood was one of the whistleblowers in the plot, which involved a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s. He was never charged with any crime.
“I felt a bit groggy. Because it was so wrong, so wildly wrong, that it just amazed me. And then I got really angry about it,” says the mayor of Hepburn Shire.
Hood’s lawyers submitted a complaint to OpenAI on March 21. The company, so far, would not have offered any response. Still, he has acknowledged on several occasions that his intelligent chatbot can make mistakes and generate misinformation. A problem that it was not able to solve in its latest version, which was made public just a few weeks ago.
Solutions like ChatGPT, as well as tools capable of generating images and videos from a handful of words, are in the spotlight after a group made up of more than a thousand personalities, including executives, developers and humanists, signed an open letter calling for a moratorium on the development of new solutions. The objective would be to implement new security measures that prevent technology from generating problems of this type. Signatories consulted by ABC have also stressed the importance of these solutions being regulated and tested by external experts.