The company behind the ChatGPT chatbot might be facing a defamation lawsuit. Reuters reports that Brian Hood, the mayor of Hepburn Shire in Australia, has sent a legal "letter of concern" notice to OpenAI, asking them to fix the errors that ChatGPT allegedly made against Hood. If they don"t, they will face a defamation lawsuit later in April.
Hood claims that many people have come up to him, stating that according to ChatGPT"s responses, he was jailed for taking part in a bribery scandal involving a company called Note Printing Australia in the early 2000s. The story stated:
Hood did work for the subsidiary, Note Printing Australia, but was the person who notified authorities about payment of bribes to foreign officials to win currency printing contracts, and was never charged with a crime, lawyers representing him said.
James Naughton, the lawyer representing Hood, stated that since Hood is now an elected official, his reputation could be hurt by these false claims from ChatGPT. So far, OpenAI has yet to respond to the letter of concern.
Chatbots like ChatGPT, Google"s Bard, and Microsoft"s Bing Chat have all been accused in the past few months of generating inaccurate and false answers to questions made by users via text prompts. However, this could be the first time someone could file a lawsuit against a chatbot company for offering false information.