A Norwegian man said he was horrified to discover that ChatGPT outputs had falsely accused him of murdering his own children.

According to a complaint filed Thursday by European Union digital rights advocates Noyb, Arve Hjalmar Holmen decided to see what information ChatGPT might provide if a user searched his name. He was shocked when ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as "a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son," a Noyb press release said.

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[–] 187 points 1 year ago (29 children)

It's AI. There's nothing to delete but the erroneous response. There is no database of facts to edit. It doesn't know fact from fiction, and the response is also very much skewed by the context of the query. I could easily get it to say the same about nearly any random name just by asking it about a bunch of family murders and then asking about a name it doesn't recognize. It is more likely to assume that person is in the same category as the others and if the one or more of the names have any association (real or fictional) with murder.

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  • [–] 105 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I don't care why. That is still libel and it is illegal for good reason. if you can't stop this for all cases then you ai is and should be illegal.

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  • [–] 48 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    None of the moneybags will listen, unfortunately. But I'm with you. The rollout of AI was extremely irresponsible. Just to make it profitable as quickly as possible.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Seems to me libel would require AI to have credibility, which it does not.

    It's a tool. Like most useful tools it can do harmful things. We know almost nothing about the provenance of this output. It could have been poisoned either accidentally or deliberately.

    But above all, the problem is ignorant people believing the output of AI is truth. It's pretty good at some things, but the more esoteric the knowledge, the less reliable it is. It's best to treat AI as a storyteller. Yeah there are a lot of facts in there but when they don't serve the story they can be embellished. I don't see the harm in just acknowledging that and moving on.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago*

    Libel requires the claims to be published or broadcasted, so it isn't. A predictive text algorithm strung some random words together, and the guy got offended.
    It's like suing because your phone keyboard autosuggested "is a murderer" as the next words after you wrote your name. Btw, I tried it a few times for lulz and managed to get it to write out "bluGill and the kids are going to get it on", so I guess you can sue Google now?

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  • [–] 46 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I have this gun machine that shoots in all directions randomly. I can't predict it, so I can't stop it from shooting you. So sorry. It's uncontrollable.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Yeah but I can just ignore the bullets because they are nerf. And I have my own nerf guns as well.

    I mean at some point any analogy fails, but AI is nothing like a gun.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    They may seem like nerf when they first come out of the AI, but they turn into real bullets once they start filling people's heads with convincing enough lies and falsehoods, and those people start wielding their own weapons against minorities, democracy, and the government. If the election of Trump 2.0 has not convinced you of the immense danger of disinformation and misinformation, I have literally no idea how anything could ever possibly get through to you.

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    [–] 90 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Well, here we are. We skipped using this tech for only search Automation and leapfrogged to directly making shit up (once again).

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  • [–] [S] 58 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    To me it's clear that these tools are primarily useful as bullshit generators, and I expect them to hallucinate and be inaccurate. But the companies trying to capitalize on the "AI" bubble are saying that these tools can be useful and accurate. I imagine OpenAI is going to have to invoke the Fox News defense in this case, and claim that "no reasonable person would take this seriously".

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Don’t use hallucinate to describe what it is doing, that is humanizing it and making the tech seem more advanced than it is. It is randomly mashing words together without understanding the meaning of any of them

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The technical term was created to promote the misunderstanding that LLMs "think". The "experts" want people to think LLMs are far more advanced than they actually are. You can add as many tokens to your context as you want - every model is still, fundamentally, a text generator. Humanizing it more than that is naive or deceptive, depending on how much money you have riding on the bubble.

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  • [–] 74 points 1 year ago (16 children)

    It’s all hallucinations.

    Some (many) just happen to be very close to factual.

    It’s sad to see that the marketing of these tools has been so effective that few realize how they work and what they do.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It really is sad. I often hear, "I even asked ChatGPT and it said..." as if that means their response is valid. I've heard people say it who I thought would know better, too.

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    [–] 50 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Is it really him that it's saying did this? I mean, I could look up my dad's name and all I get are articles about a serial killer who just happened to have the same name; and that's not generated by AI. Names aren't usually unique identifiers.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Plot twist: "Dad" isn't even his real name.

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    [–] 23 points 1 year ago

    Or ChatGPT has become a precog and is reporting a precrime. Lock him up!

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    When do we start suing makers of fortune cookies for lucky coincidences?

    "Claim".

    I mean, the guy is right, because it's advertised as "artificial intelligence".

    Were it advertised as word salad generator, a Markovian chain grown big and scary, something in principle similar to programs for generation of fantasy language texts and spells and names (if someone remembers 00s good old web) for roleplaying, - then there would be no problem.

    But if to sell something better you lie what it is, and that lie has social consequences, you should get sued to freezing hot inferno with mustard-greased giant-cockroach-dildo-covered walls. You should also probably face criminal charges.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Are we sure that someone else with that name hasn't committed those crimes? After all if I search my name it says I'm an astronaut, because there is an actual NASA astronaut with my name. It's not saying I'm that person, it's just saying that that name is the same as that person's.

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    [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    There's a list of names of people who have sued OpenAI, they often cause ChatGPT to shut down.

    We should keep those names handy just incase cyber dogs are ever chasing us.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    Certain names, including "David Mayer," "Brian Hood," "Jonathan Turley," "Jonathan Zittrain," "David Faber," and "Guido Scorza," cause ChatGPT to produce an error message and terminate the chat session, likely due to a hard-coded filter or privacy concerns.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    Sorry, I've spent months telling chatgpt that Arve Hjalmar Holmen killed his kids for a school project.

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  • [+] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
    [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    when I've searched my name with Google over the years, it has said I'm a high school football star, corporate lawyer, Ironman competitor, hotel chef, tech support specialist, janitorial manager, and horse trainer. LIES! ALL LIES!!!

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    [–] 8 points 1 year ago
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