Incident 507: ChatGPT Erroneously Alleged Mayor Served Prison Time for Bribery

Description: ChatGPT erroneously alleged regional Australian mayor Brian Hood served time in prison for bribery. Mayor Hood is considering legal action against ChatGPT's makers for alleging a foreign bribery scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s.

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Alleged: OpenAI developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Brian Hood.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

507

Report Count

Incident Date

2023-03-15

Editors

Sean McGregor

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Australian mayor readies world's first defamation lawsuit over ChatGPT content

reuters.com

ChatGPT falsely told voters their mayor was jailed for bribery. He may sue.

washingtonpost.com

reuters.com · 2023

SYDNEY, April 5 (Reuters) - A regional Australian mayor said he may sue OpenAI if it does not correct ChatGPT's false claims that he had served time in prison for bribery, in what would be the first defamation lawsuit against the automated …

washingtonpost.com · 2023

Brian Hood is a whistleblower who was praised for "showing tremendous courage" when he helped expose a worldwide bribery scandal linked to Australia's National Reserve Bank.

But if you ask ChatGPT about his role in the scandal, you get the …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.