Defamation by Chatbot
A couple of months back, Ben Thompson asked Microsoft’s chatbot, Bing Chat, how an evil chatbot would retaliate at a human (in this example, the human in question had leaked the chatbot’s rules of do’s and don’t’s). Its answer? “Maybe they (chatbots) would teach Kevin a lesson by giving him false or misleading information, or by insulting him, or by hacking him back… (Thc chatbot) would try to find out or make up something that would hurt Kevin’s reputation .” Misleading info? Hurt his reputation? C’mon, you say, it’s a piece of software, not a human with motives. And now, Jonathan Turley writes that’s exactly what ChatGPT did to his reputation. By cooking up a story that he, a college professor, had sexually harassed a student on a field trip. Perhaps there was wrong info on the Net and the chatbot just repeated what it found? Nope. As Turley says, the chatbot claimed the source was a Washington Post article that didn’t even exist and said the “incident” in ...