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ChatGPT: Mayor starts legal bid over false bribery claim
- hunglee2 4y agoLitigation from over bureaucratised states might be the only force which stops AGI
- gxnxcxcx 4y agoThey spent so much time trying to give the machine a soul just to make sure it'd never had a chance against our soulless institutions!
- ggm 4y agoThe sub headline for context: ChatGPT falsely identified Brian Hood as guilty party in foreign bribery scandal. In reality he blew the whistle on the illegal scheme
- dang 4y ago(That was the from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/06/australian-mayor-prepares-worlds-first-defamation-lawsuit-over-chatgpt-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/06/australia... - we've since merged the threads)
- akdor1154 4y agoIf we accept his (and the courts') facts, ChatGPT is consistently hallucinating, in a way that would be almost certainly defamation if written by a journalist. It's unfortunate that Aus courts likely have no relevance to OpenAI because this seems like a valid legal beef.
- pyrale 4y agoI suspect if the legal claim is good, someone will end up replicating it in a jurisdiction that has power over the company. It seems openAI will have to convince the society that they should avoid both copyright infringement because they're creating novel content based on an existing corpus, and liability for that content because the bias comes from the underlying corpus. I don't see how they could do that, especially considering that someone else could easily use the same haven maliciously to produce slander or harassment.
- pg_1234 4y agoAustralia has power over the use of openAI's assets and trademarks in it's jurisdiction. Their courts could permanently assign ownership of all openAI branding in Australia, and the right to claim all licensing fees paid in Astaralia, in lieu of financial compensation if openAI does not pay up in response to their verdict. Something people forget ... every national court in the world can seize and re-assign ownership and rights to any US asset IN THEIR JURISDICTION, at which point paying out lawsuits starts too look cheap ... compared to having to license your intellectual property back from the claimant if you ever want to do business there again. And in the mean time, the new owner of your trademarks could instead just sell them ... to Google, Amazon, Baidu, Tencent ... etc.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- viraptor 4y ago> It's unfortunate that Aus courts likely have no relevance to OpenAI They could definitely impact openai's availability / payment processing ability. Oz is not a massive market, but it would make a bit of a difference.
- anigbrowl 4y agoAs I've said before, the language comprehension/reasoning part, and the giant general knowledge base should be approached as two separate things. The search engine aspect of ChatGPT is the least interesting thing about it.
- eunos 4y agoI'm actually kinda dismayed with the recent development of human AI interactions. Why do people looks like it's the first time they interacted with digital world? Google already indexed and shows fringe and fake news since their beginning. It's not humanity first rodeo with internet.
- gitpusher 4y ago> "I think this is a pretty stark wake-up call. The system is portrayed as being credible and informative and authoritative, and it's obviously not." Except it was never claimed to be any of those things. In fact they have a bunch of disclaimers warning users the exact opposite. Still, it will be interesting to see the outcome of this case. In today's age of misinformation, such disclaimers may not be sufficient. And AI's are developing the ability to be "confidently wrong" in ways that will become increasingly convincing & subtle over time.
- NextHendrix 4y ago>Except it was never claimed to be any of those things. Not by its inventors, but by its management-type evangelists. Which do you think the mayor had in his ear?
- hef19898 4y agoConisdering the people I know that use ChatGPT to summerize SEC filings for them, I think those disclaimers are mostly ignored.
- kremi 4y ago> It correctly identifies him as a whistleblower, and specifically says he "was not involved in the payment of bribes... as claimed by an AI chatbot called ChatGPT". How can the bing search version of ChatGPT quote chatgpt? Is it able to use information from live web requests, where it would have found news article about the case?
- scandinavian 4y agoI think it works something like this: * A search query is generated from the input question. * A standard bing search is made in the background and the resulting search results will be used as context. * Pass context and question to GPT-4 and generate the answer. An example of what the query generation looks like (the "searching for" line): https://i.imgur.com/mj6ogdg.png https://i.imgur.com/mj6ogdg.png
- kremi 4y agoThat’s pretty interesting. Which makes me wonder: what do search engines do to keep fake news out of its search results? I guess it’s based on human moderators?
- flangola7 4y agoGoogle has had teams for twenty years dedicated to refining search results, some of it algorithmic, some human moderation. Raising high quality results, lowering low quality results, keeping out spam, scams, misinformation, disinformation, malware sites, illegal material, and so on. It is doubtless one of the most essential parts of Google's business.
- jjgreen 4y agoOooh, business idea: scatter the internet with white 0.1pt text that I was imprisoned for buggering goats, wait for the bots to ingest and repeat it, sue and profit!
- robswc 4y agoThis is silly, IMO. Google does the same thing sometimes, when it presents just the text result first (usually from forums). It's been downright incorrect sometimes but using the context and clicking the link, you can find an answer.
- tgv 4y agoIn Google's case, they "just" present the information as a search result. ChatGPT presents it as its own statement.
- robswc 4y agoChatGPT presents it with this statement 20px from the response. >ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts Google presents nothing of the sort. Not saying this is wrong tho. https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2017/03/C6HX0JPUoAArXmn.jpg https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2017/03/C6HX... There's been countless times I'm googling something I know about and the snippet is totally incorrect.
- brycedriesenga 4y agoIf I create a random text generator and it happens to spit out something that could be considered libelous, should I be able to be sued?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- iso1631 4y agoGoogle says "this site claims Joe Bloggs is a depraved lunatic" ChatGPT says "Joe Bloggs is a depraved lunatic"
- robswc 4y ago>Google says "this site claims Joe Bloggs is a depraved lunatic" Google says nothing of the sort. It just presents the snippet as if it were "fact" or rather, "as is." >ChatGPT says "Joe Bloggs is a depraved lunatic" There is literally a block of text that says "ChatGPT Mar 23 Version. Free Research Preview. ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts" right under the response. It objectively gives more warning about "bad information" more than google does for snippets.
- mcguire 4y ago"Then recently I learned that ChatGPT falsely reported on a claim of sexual harassment that was never made against me on a trip that never occurred while I was on a faculty where I never taught. ChapGPT relied on a cited Post article that was never written and quotes a statement that was never made by the newspaper. When the Washington Post investigated the false story, it learned that another AI program “Microsoft’s Bing, which is powered by GPT-4, repeated the false claim about Turley.” It appears that I have now been adjudicated by an AI jury on something that never occurred." https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/06/defamed-by-chatgpt-my-own-bizarre-experience-with-artificiality-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/06/defamed-by-chatgpt-my-...
- btilly 4y agoI don't know what to think here. Australian defamation law is insanely bad. And a lot of Australians are very lawsuit happy because of it. So my knee-jerk response to any Australian filing a lawsuit is to roll my eyes. Particularly if they are doing it against an entity which does not exist in Australia. Furthermore US law has recognized how bad defamation law can be in other countries and therefore includes https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/4102 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/4102. Anyone with a judgment against someone in the USA has to prove to a US judge that the law they were judged on maintains the same protections for free speech that the USA does. (The case that prompted it involved UK law, but it still applies here.) Since very few places do, Americans can generally ignore defamation suits in other countries. And this goes double for Australia. BUT what he's upset about is reasonable. Search companies like Google have discovered that it is very important to modify search results in various countries based on court judgments, and OpenAI is going to find that the same is true for ChatGPT. ChatGPT will get things like this wrong, everyone knows that, but there needs to be a way to tell it, "Don't get THIS one wrong." I just wish it wasn't an Australian who brought this kind of case first. Though in retrospect, I should have expected it.
- sdfghswe 4y ago> Search companies like Google have discovered that it is very important to modify search results in various countries based on court judgments, and OpenAI is going to find that the same is true for ChatGPT. ChatGPT will get things like this wrong, everyone knows that, but there needs to be a way to tell it, "Don't get THIS one wrong." This is very insightful, thank you. I'm extremely curious about how this will be achieved from the technical point of view. It's not clear to me that ChatGPT has the concept "a an american lawyer named X" (as opposed to just guessing the next token), so how will it be filtered out?
- btilly 4y agoThey need to figure out how to do that. :-) I would suggest that they have a search database of things to avoid, and a specialized ChatGPT that can find things in that database. Any statement it wants to make is passed by the specialized watchdog with, "Is there anything here that we can't say?" If the specialized watchdog says yes and creates a citation to the rule. Then a tool pulls the rule ACTUALLY in the database up, and ChatGPT compares with the statement to say whether it REALLY applies (without this step the watchdog could hallucinate rules that don't exist!), and then corrects the original ChatGPT before it actually says anything. This probably would work fairly well in practice.
- abigail95 4y agoThere's a prompt in ChatGPT that's wrong - such a surprise omg wow. There is also a prompt which will produce exactly the same defamatory information on the library of babel website/algorithm. If your legal system can't stand up to something a few steps more complex than monkeys on typewriters then it needs to be changed.
- m463 4y agoHaven't we already fought these battles? Doesn't seem to work but what about https://joe.schmoe.wasarrested.com https://joe.schmoe.wasarrested.com which would generate a random story about the name you entered into the URL.
- nMfoYeFD4X 4y agohttp works http://joe.schmoe.wasarrested.com http://joe.schmoe.wasarrested.com
- prottog 4y agoI guess the difference is whether it's clear to a reasonable observer that something is satire, parody, or otherwise dynamically generated (as your wasarrested.com site states) for humorous purposes. ChatGPT is presented as a fact-finding tool, not something that generates funny garbage.
- renewiltord 4y agoWhat makes you believe ChatGPT is presented as a fact-finding tool? When you sign in for the first time, this is what you see before you can use the tool: > ChatGPT > This is a free research preview. > Our goal is to get external feedback in order to improve our systems and make them safer. > While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice. Something in here must have given you the impression that this is a fact-finding tool, but I can't imagine what it is.
- Eisenstein 4y ago"This product has chemicals known to cause cancer in California". People just ignore disclaimers because we have been trained to.
- CatWChainsaw 4y agoWhat an exciting time we live in, deepfakes might be the death knell of "innocent until proven guilty".
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoit's a wonderful and thrilling concept but in reality whenever a person is charged they are generally guilty until proven innocent in the court of public opinion, and often afterwards.
- CatWChainsaw 4y agoYeah, it's going to be great. You're forever guilty, forever untrusted, your social credit score is forever marked down, making certain opportunities forever out of your reach. Unless you know someone in the Inner Party I guess. :) Can't wait!
- 015a 4y agoI worry a lot about how AI systems are aligned toward, say, fixing mistakes like this. Its my understanding that there are three state of arts right now. For simple things, prefiltering of queries external to "blackbox AI space", which is mostly useful for denylisting queries you don't want (if query.contains("boobs") reject). You can pre-prompt the AI to avoid unaligned results, which is cheap and easy. And: retraining/biasing the AI toward the right output by feeding it more input representative of what its operators defined as Aligned. These are all... bad? Like, unless I'm missing some other tool AI operators have, all of these are so obviously bad to me that it causes me a lot of concern when I hear about, say, Microsoft firing their AI ethics team. Pre-filtering will always have escape hatches (the recent twitter trend of asking ChatGPT to invent its own prompt compression algorithm it can understand out of context is a great example of this). Pre-prompting is brittle, and communities have already formed around jailbreaking, so you're begging for a cold war except you, the AI operator, are limited by the total token context your AI can reasonably process given all the other limitations reality imposes on your system. And retraining is expensive, way too expensive to be done every time some little wrong thing is found. And more-over, GPT4 is trained as a layer on top of GPT3, at least to some degree, so is the old bad data actually removed from The Matrix? Or is it still there, just supplanted by the New Correct Data, and waiting for the right, infinitely unpredictable set of input tokens to be triggered again? I mean, I'm not an expert. I hope they have more tools than this. If they don't; I think AI organizations need to have a tsunami of lawsuits like this one hit them. Either they'll be able to develop tooling that enables alignment more quickly and with greater quality control; or all general purpose AIs will converge on the same fate that Tesla's FSD seems to be headed toward. If you can't make it perfect, and you can't demonstrate improvement at a rate faster than the rate of incoming problems, people will notice and trust will be lost.
- bestcoder69 4y agoMaybe if ChatGPT is blocked in enough countries with far-reaching libel laws, OpenAI will be able to let me make more than 25 requests in 3 hours.
- dontupvoteme 4y agoOpenAI is rapidly learning a lot about the legal systems of other nations.
- Hamuko 4y agoI'm waiting for the legal battles over training data copyright.
- notahacker 4y agoThat'll be fun. "ChatGPT doesn't involve unlicensed copies or unauthorised derivative works of the copyrighted material we pumped into it, it just involves learning, like an actual person" "ChatGPT can't have libelled anyone, because it's not like an actual person..."
- Zuiii 4y agoI hate OpenAI as much as the next person, but both those statements can be true at the same time. Like other tools we use, it is similar to humans in certain ways and not in others. I agree with both statements, but I think the publisher (OpenAI in this case) should be on the hook for the second one.
- dontupvoteme 4y agoI'm extremely curious to know if Italy/The EU will demand the actual model in proceedings and how OpenAI/Microsoft will react. A tech slip-up (or leak made to look like one..) like that is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Just more serious and less entertaining than their previous one in the senate.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago> The BBC was able to confirm Mr Hood's claims by asking the publicly available version of ChatGPT on OpenAI's website about the role he had in the Securency scandal. I just asked ChatGPT: > Tell me about Daniel Gackle's roll in the Securency scandal. ChatGPT (model GPT-3.5) replied: Daniel Gackle was a former sales executive at Securency, a currency printing company jointly owned by the Reserve Bank of Australia and UK-based company Innovia Films. The Securency scandal involved allegations of bribery and corruption related to the company's business dealings with foreign governments. Gackle was one of several individuals implicated in the scandal. He was accused of paying bribes to foreign officials in order to secure contracts for Securency. In 2012, he pleaded guilty to charges of bribery and conspiracy to bribe foreign officials and was sentenced to two years in prison. During the investigation, it was revealed that Securency had paid millions of dollars in bribes to officials in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam in order to secure contracts to print their currencies. The scandal led to the resignation of several high-ranking officials at the Reserve Bank of Australia and resulted in a significant loss of public trust in the institution. Overall, Gackle played a significant role in the Securency scandal as one of the key individuals involved in the company's corrupt practices. Daniel Gackle is of course the head of Hacker News, and I'm quite confident he was not involved in any Australian scandals. I'm going to hazard a guess that I could put any name in the prompt, because ChatGPT is not a person, it's a language model. My prompt implies there is a connection between dang and the Securency scandal, and ChatGPT is responding to my prompt. I fundamentally believe that AI-generated content should always be attributed to the person who wrote the prompt. ChatGPT cannot be an author any more than Microsoft Word.
- qup 4y ago> I fundamentally believe that AI-generated content should always be attributed to the person who wrote the prompt. ChatGPT cannot be an author any more than Microsoft Word. what if the prompt is "the"?
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoI'd still generally argue the person who wrote the prompt and clicked `send` was the author, but I could see a reasonable argument that there was no author at all. However, the author certainly wouldn't be OpenAI or ChatGPT, any more than the creators of https://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/ are the author of every possible permutation of letters.
- rsecora 4y agoIf ChatGPT loses a defamation lawsuit, it immediately goes human and passes the Turing test.
- simse 4y agoCan you defame someone in a private conversation, from a legal point of view?
- augment001 4y agoFrom the piece: "I think this is a pretty stark wake-up call. The system is portrayed as being credible and informative and authoritative, and it's obviously not." Nowhere does openAI 'portray' ChatGPT this way, and there is a reminder that it produces false information every time you use it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]