[HN Gopher] ChatGPT: Mayor starts legal bid over false bribery c...
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ChatGPT: Mayor starts legal bid over false bribery claim
Author : dijksterhuis
Score : 83 points
Date : 2023-04-06 17:00 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I'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/ are the author of
| every possible permutation of letters.
| qup wrote:
| I would argue that it's a tool outputting text. There is no
| authorship, just publication of the tool's output. The
| output is designed to resemble authored works, but here the
| human we can credit is just using a tool and hoping the
| output is useful.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Right, and as I said I think that's reasonable. My
| "counter" would be that their are pieces on display at
| the MOMA which amount to more-or-less random splatters of
| paint, and we still attribute those to specific artists+.
|
| But I don't know the right answer. What I know for sure
| is who the author _isn 't_: it's _not_ the paint
| manufacturer, and it 's not gravity.
|
| ---
|
| + I'm not hating on these pieces, they're a huge part of
| why I like going to MOMA, I never know what to expect!
| qup wrote:
| It's a fun new debate in a sea of boring ones, at least.
|
| I have a hard time crediting the text generator with any
| kind of agency, and therefore liability. We know the
| nature of the tool, we know it can output basically any
| text when prompted correctly.
|
| As in your analogy, I think OpenAI is about as
| responsible for the output of the thing as a typewriter
| manufacturer is for the contents of novels written on
| their machines. It's a tool, for now.
|
| But you certainly can't make ME responsible as an author
| of some libel just because I prompted the machine. As a
| rule, I have no idea what it will output when I prompt
| it. I have an expectation, sometimes even a goal, but no
| assurances whatsoever, therefore I cannot be held
| responsible.
|
| What I can be held responsible for is the dissemination
| of that text, or perhaps fraudulently holding it up as
| more than just generated text from my tool.
|
| I think it's the whole AI/agency debate that even gives
| any credence at all to this being libel, but I think most
| of us agree at this point that it's just a text
| generating tool. The text it generates is largely
| irrelevant to a discussion about libel IMO, because
| libelous generated text should just be left
| unpublished/unused. It's a useless output, of which the
| tool generates many.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I am not a lawyer, but I would assume (!) that libel
| implies _publishing_ the libelous information. Which
| means you cannot be guilty of libel for writing a ChatGPT
| prompt any more than you can be guilty of libel for
| writing "Brian Hood murders puppies" in a secret
| personal diary. Unless, as you stated, you go and publish
| the information as fact.
|
| > I think it's the whole AI/agency debate that even gives
| any credence at all to this being libel, but I think most
| of us agree at this point that it's just a text
| generating tool. The text it generates is largely
| irrelevant to a discussion about libel IMO, because
| libelous generated text should just be left
| unpublished/unused.
|
| Well, we got here because an Australian politician is in
| fact suing for libel, which I think is exceedingly
| ridiculous and potentially a dangerous precedent,
| whatever you think of language models.
| notahacker wrote:
| > I fundamentally believe that AI-generated content should
| always be attributed to the person who wrote the prompt.
|
| That seems problematic in the context of libel lawsuits, since
| ChatGPT is also prone to "hallucinating" potentially libellous
| statements when the prompt author is asking genuine open
| questions.
|
| (I do tend to agree that ChatGPT itself cannot be an "author",
| but I think OpenAI Inc could claim its output as their creative
| work if it wished - questions about its inputs notwithstanding
| - and also potentially be held liable for [not making
| reasonable attempts to avoid] libellous claims it makes.
| Section 230 and equivalent protections may or may not apply to
| the latter)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > That seems problematic in the context of libel lawsuits,
| since ChatGPT is also prone to "hallucinating" potentially
| libellous statements when the prompt author is asking genuine
| open questions.
|
| But they also put a big disclaimer at the bottom that the
| facts it produces may be inaccurate. Would it help if they
| said everything produced is a work of fiction? "Any
| resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or
| dead, is entirely coincidental."
|
| I think everyone needs to stop treating ChatGPT like a search
| engine. This includes Microsoft. It's not a good use case,
| because you can't trust what it says. It's a great _starting
| point_ for further research, but you can 't take the answers
| at face value.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| > But they also put a big disclaimer at the bottom that the
| facts it produces may be inaccurate.
|
| They already do something similar if you ask it to write
| "naughty" code. I asked it out of curiosity to call some
| shellcode via python, and it gave me a warning at the end
| that this code was for educational purposes.
| notahacker wrote:
| > But they also put a big disclaimer at the bottom that the
| facts it produces may be inaccurate.
|
| I don't think the disclaimer means that the people that
| type "what is $whistleblower's involvement in $scandal?"
| bears more responsibility for the false statements the LLM
| makes in response than the people that built the machine,
| trained it and decided which "safety" guidelines they were
| and weren't willing to impose. That'd be like arguing true
| responsibility for the content on websites lay with people
| whose search strings lead to that page. There's a much
| better argument OpenAI ought to get some sort of Section
| 230 style protection since like purely user-generated
| outputs, their model interacts with users in novel and
| unpredictable ways they can't feasibly monitor in real
| time. But it is their model and (as with Section 230), it's
| their responsibility to attempt to avoid ChatGPT emitting
| the same libellous answer in future, not the responsibility
| of its users to avoid using it. Particularly since low
| temperature LLMs' mistakes tend to be repeated.
|
| And ultimately, the way you get Microsoft to stop promoting
| ChatGPT as a search engine isn't by passing liability for
| its failures on to the user
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| No one should be liable for _anything_ they don 't
| publish. You can write whatever you want into a private
| Google doc. Likewise, I can feed whatever prompt I want
| into ChatGPT and read the output.
|
| By contrast, if I go and _publish_ those false
| statements, yes I do think I should be liable for that!
| notahacker wrote:
| But ChatGPT isn't a private Google document, it's a low
| temperature content generation model which can emit
| variations on the same false allegation to a very large
| number of users if it happens to be relevant to a
| commonly asked about topic.
|
| Clearly this occurring would have the same effect on the
| reputation of the subject of the false allegation as
| libel output by a traditional publication. Your
| suggestion is that culpability for the libel rests with
| hundreds of individuals that asked innocent questions and
| received answers, and maybe even shared them whilst
| reasonably believing them. My suggestion is that OpenAI,
| the entity behind the model which actually generated the
| false allegation, might be the more appropriate party to
| target (with appropriate protections if they respond
| swiftly to try to prevent the libellous claim from
| reoccurring)
| emporas wrote:
| Suing a program for false claims, is one more example of why
| comedy will never surpass reality, in it's ability to make
| people laugh.
|
| A machine cannot express opinions about anything, or deny
| claims, or author allegations or anything like that. The
| machine parsed a lot of internet data, it does some statistical
| analysis of the input text and based on that it produces text
| that would most likely follow the input. How can that be
| considered claim of anyone about anything?
| jjgreen wrote:
| Oooh, 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| In Google's case, they "just" present the information as a
| search result. ChatGPT presents it as its own statement.
| brycedriesenga wrote:
| If 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?
| robswc wrote:
| ChatGPT 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/C6HX...
|
| There's been countless times I'm googling something I know
| about and the snippet is totally incorrect.
| kube-system wrote:
| And they've also been similarly sued:
|
| https://www.techspot.com/news/93099-google-warns-defamation-...
| UncleMeat wrote:
| One boxes with incorrect information has been a source of
| controversy since they were introduced. And that's even when it
| has a link to the source of the information.
| [deleted]
| iso1631 wrote:
| Google says "this site claims Joe Bloggs is a depraved lunatic"
|
| ChatGPT says "Joe Bloggs is a depraved lunatic"
| robswc wrote:
| >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.
| tgv wrote:
| No, it presents the snippet as "that's what page http://etc
| says". That's why they can get away with avoiding any kind
| of responsibility. They're not (considered) a publisher.
| robswc wrote:
| >No, it presents the snippet as "that's what page
| http://etc says".
|
| Most tech savy people could certainly infer that... but
| try it for yourself. It doesn't say anywhere on the page,
| anything like "Google says "this site claims Joe Bloggs
| is a depraved lunatic"". It just has a link to the page
| that the text comes from. The result even tends to just
| blend in with the rest of the results too.
|
| https://external-
| preview.redd.it/hqLyrdGiwnxXNk-60nQy3Ubw4qa...
|
| In the context of this thread, I can't imagine how the
| above screenshot is better than a disclaimer right under
| the text-box that explicitly states it can generate false
| information.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| viraptor wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| As 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.
| 015a wrote:
| I 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.
| abigail95 wrote:
| There'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.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| Litigation from over bureaucratised states might be the only
| force which stops AGI
| simse wrote:
| Can you defame someone in a private conversation, from a legal
| point of view?
| eunos wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| > "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.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| There's already case law showing labeling a novel fiction is
| not necessarily enough to protect yourself from losing at
| defamation litigation.
| brycedriesenga wrote:
| Well, that seems ridiculous, but I'd be curious to find the
| actual case.
| notahacker wrote:
| Is it really that ridiculous? If someone writes a novel
| with an extremely detailed and believable backdrop full of
| real famous people people and detailed descriptions of
| actual events which also happens to include some salacious
| allegations about one of those famous people, and readers
| generally believe that salacious allegation is one of the
| bits of the backdrop to the story which actually happened,
| is that any less harmful to that person's reputation than a
| tweet?
| lisasays wrote:
| _In fact they have a bunch of disclaimers warning users the
| exact opposite._
|
| Maybe buried in the fine print somewhere.
|
| Its own splash page, however, paints much more of a "what's not
| to like?" picture:
|
| _We've trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a
| conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for
| ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes,
| challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate
| requests._
|
| Or in one of its "customer stories", it boast of how GPT-4 can
| act as "essentially the most knowledgeable person in your
| company":
|
| _"You essentially have the knowledge of the most knowledgeable
| person in Wealth Management--instantly", McMillan adds. "Think
| of it as having our Chief Investment Strategist, Chief Global
| Economist, Global Equities Strategist, and every other analyst
| around the globe on call for every advisor, every day. We
| believe that is a transformative capability for our company."_
|
| This sure sounds asymptotically close to "[portraying] the
| system as being credible and informative and authoritative",
| per the parent comment.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| When you sign up and every time you log in on a new device it
| shows you popup that takes over the whole page where you need
| to click "Next" 3 times. That's not small print buried away
| somewhere.
|
| I just signed in with an incognito tab to see the popup again
|
| https://imgur.com/EbSafWr
| lisasays wrote:
| As with tobacco companies that of course have warning
| labels in all the legally mandated places -- yet still run
| zillions of ads showing what a youthful, vibrant, carefree
| lifestyle their product enables -- it's plain to see the
| real message they intend to get across.
|
| That is to say: the "higher truth" that they want their
| customers to walk away with.
| henriquez wrote:
| It's about equivalent to calling a driving assist "Autopilot"
| and then screaming "they should have read the fine print!!!"
| when it kills people who thought it was autopilot.
| twblalock wrote:
| Disclaimers are not a guaranteed release from liability.
|
| Especially in the case of libel/defamation law, and especially
| in the UK and Australia, where even true statements can get you
| in trouble, putting up a disclaimer may not give you any
| protection at all.
| NextHendrix wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Conisdering the people I know that use ChatGPT to summerize
| SEC filings for them, I think those disclaimers are mostly
| ignored.
| deltree7 wrote:
| summarizing is different from generating and different from
| searching
| eropple wrote:
| Could you remind me what the "G" in "GPT" means?
| deltree7 wrote:
| Wow!, do you know what the Ms in 3M mean?
| eropple wrote:
| I do, as it happens. But your snippy response isn't
| responsive to the core of the concept to which my
| question referred.
|
| "Pulling in a chunk of content and probabilistically
| summarizing it is somehow not _generative work_ " does
| not make pass the sniff test. And "probabilistically" is
| load-bearing there: you are reliant on probabilistic
| weights to _not_ have that _generated_ summary turn out
| to be hogwash.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| It isn't guaranteed to be accurate for any of these
| cases, so the difference is irrelevant here.
| sbassi wrote:
| summarize a given text is a valid task for this tool.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Considering the results, in that case, is at least
| negligent.
| smcin wrote:
| > Except it was never claimed to be any of those things.
|
| Not true. Yes it was specifically claimed to be, by Bing (and I
| don't see on Bing any link to OpenAI's TOU):
|
| https://www.bing.com/ _the new Bing, your AI-powered copilot
| for the web._
|
| https://www.bing.com/new :
|
| > Introducing the new Bing: Ask real questions. _Get complete
| answers._ Chat and create.
|
| > Ask anything. Ask your questions - short, long or anything in
| between. _The more precise you ask, the better the answer._
|
| > ... Answers are just the beginning: The new Bing offers you
| _reliable_ , up-to-date results - and complete answers to your
| questions. Of course, it also cites the sources.
|
| Clearly claims it gives complete, precise, reliable answers to
| questions. There are absolutely no disclaimers on either of
| those pages about accuracy or "for entertainment purposes
| only". The only thing is a link to the terms of use which
| largely contradicts what the front pages are clearly marketing
| it as:
|
| https://www.bing.com/new/termsofuse
|
| and even then you have to hunt, buried below-the-fold on screen
| 3/4, for the weaselly language:
|
| > _9. No Guarantees; No Representations or Warranties;
| Indemnification by You. We plan to continue to develop and
| improve the Online Services, but we make no guarantees or
| promises about how the Online Services operate or that they
| will function as intended. The Online Services are for
| entertainment purposes; the Online Services are not error-free,
| may not work as expected and may generate incorrect
| information. You should not rely on the Online Services and you
| should not use the Online Services for advice of any kind. Your
| use of the Online Services is at your own risk_
|
| For example, to a layman "this service is not error-free" would
| be be understood as merely "the server might occasionally
| crash/ hang/ timeout", not "the AI may randomly fabricate
| completely untrue and fictitious, yet plausible-looking,
| claimed facts. Do not trust a word it outputs".
|
| (The gap will be totally blurred once there's a feedback-loop
| where web content written by GPT (in any jurisdiction) gets
| reindexed by Bing(/Google) then relied on as fact, without
| attribution or disclaimer. From content-farms to libel-farms,
| disinformation-farms, reputation-laundering-farms, election-
| influencing farms... so many possibilities. And people could
| pick the most permissive jurisdiction to host such content in.)
|
| > Still, it will be interesting to see the outcome of this
| case.
|
| For sure. And remember, any court case would likely be in an
| Australian court under Australian law with Australian
| penalties. I do not believe the above TOU trickery (arguing
| that precise, yet totally false, answers are 'reliable'...
| 'complete answers' to user questions) will fly in Australian
| court.
| kremi wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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
| kremi wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| Google 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.
| m463 wrote:
| Haven't we already fought these battles?
|
| Doesn't seem to work but what about
| https://joe.schmoe.wasarrested.com
|
| which would generate a random story about the name you entered
| into the URL.
| prottog wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| What 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.
| nMfoYeFD4X wrote:
| http works http://joe.schmoe.wasarrested.com
| mcguire wrote:
| " _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-...
| bestcoder69 wrote:
| Maybe 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.
| ggm wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| (That was the from
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/06/australia...
| - we've since merged the threads)
| btilly wrote:
| I 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. 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| sacred_numbers wrote:
| I can think of a few ways: 1. The ChatGPT web search plugin
| becomes standard protocol for every prompt. If you ask a
| factual question ChatGPT will first look up an answer with a
| search engine, then use the results to craft an answer. This
| could also be implemented using a knowledge database created
| by scraping the web that is occasionally updated rather than
| actually performing a web search every time. This also allows
| OpenAI to shift the blame to whatever source it found rather
| than ChatGPT if it does find libelous content. 2. OpenAI will
| just add a disclaimer to every response (or at least every
| response that appears to be asking a factual question) saying
| that asking factual questions is unreliable. 3. If there is a
| blacklist of topics that require a disclaimer or cause the
| LLM to refuse to answer, it can generate an answer, check it
| against the blacklist using embeddings/semantic search and
| either re-generate an answer or generate a refusal before
| showing the answer to the user.
|
| My best guess is that it will be a combination of 1 and 2. I
| have always maintained that LLMs are very unlikely to develop
| into AGI on their own, but are very likely to be a critical
| piece of an AGI. The most recent research into scaling laws
| (Chinchilla, Llama) finds significant improvements from
| scaling data size much farther than parameter size, so
| memorizing facts within the parameters will become less and
| less feasible. This is actually ideal, though, since you want
| your model parameters to encode language and reasoning
| patterns, not memorize facts. If it's memorizing facts you
| either need more data or better (i.e. deduplicated) data. I'm
| not an expert, though, and I'm too lazy for a research
| review, so please don't sue me for libel if my facts are out
| of date.
| btilly wrote:
| They 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Australian defamation law is insanely bad. And a lot of
| Australians are very lawsuit happy because of it. _
|
| Same in Germany and Austria. You need to be very careful what
| you say online about people, especially politicians, and what
| reviews you leave online to various businesses, or you can end
| up with a defamation lawsuit letter in your mailbox, even if
| what you wrote was the truth. Lots of lawsuit happy people
| here.
|
| A small bikeshop I took my bike for a service completely messed
| up my shifter and would refuse to acknowledge it, so I left
| them a 1 star review on Google maps and took my bike somewhere
| else, and a month later I got a letter from their lawyer
| telling me that unless I can prove in court they fucked up my
| shifter, I have to take down my 1 star review or else they'll
| sue me for damages due to lost business as all their other
| reviews are all 5 stars. Lol, make sense how they got only 5
| star reviews.
|
| There's also a website here to find doctors, rate them and
| leave them reviews, but when you try to leave one a review, you
| get a huge warning pop-up explaining you what you're not
| allowed to write in the review, and than includes "mentioning a
| misdiagnosis". I was speechless. Like what's the point then?
|
| This goes on and on, for almost all review based website,
| including jobs. Since the owner of the business can have the
| negative reviews or comments he doesn't like removed under
| defamation laws, making most review worthless in the end.
|
| So.e local gren party politician in Austria got called a "lousy
| traitor" and "corrupt bumpkin" on her Facebook page and that
| politician took Facebook to court to have all such comments
| about her removed under the defamation law arguing that insults
| aren't free speech, and won, with Facebook having to remove the
| comments worldwide, not just on the Austrian Facebook page,
| leaving the question of how a country can just censor parts of
| the global internet, as that would set a precedent for other
| countries to do the same.[1]
|
| This is what I appreciate a lot about the US (and other
| countries), you can say and write whatever you want about
| anyone. Want to call your local politician a corrupt dickhead
| and teel him to go f*ck himself? Go ahead! Want to leave a 1
| star review because the service swindled you? It's your 1st
| amendment! This is in no way possible here. I get the need for
| privacy and defamation laws, but when those laws are a powerful
| backdoor for bad actors to use them for censorship and
| intimidation, for their own benefit, then maybe those laws
| should be defanged a bit to preserve free speech.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/opinion/facebook-
| censorsh...
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| That is very surprising to me given the German system of
| incredibly detailed and basically graded (1.0-4.0 / A-F for
| Americans) employee reference statements (to say nothing
| about the coded comments about alcohol use, fraternization,
| etc that specific word usage implies)
|
| Sure the American system is the other way around (say nothing
| because they could sue if we say more than dates they worked
| here), but is that never challenged for defamation?
| jabiko wrote:
| I think the main difference is that the German system
| revolves around freedom of opinion and not freedom of
| speech. If you assert a negative fact about someone, you
| have to be able to proof it. You are however free to
| express your opinion about anyone and anything.
|
| Section 186 and 187 are probably relevant for that:
| https://www.gesetze-im-
| internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
| MandieD wrote:
| The coded nature of German employer references is to make
| them lawsuit-proof. "But it said you 'performed your duties
| to their satisfaction' - what's libelous about that?"
|
| ("Performed duties to our satisfaction" = yeah, they showed
| up and generally attempted to do what they were told, but
| that's about it)
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| Yet I've seen HR documents which directly map the code to
| the rating. I can't imagine this stuff holds up in court
| when I remember reading about it online years ago and
| anyone working in HR in the country will immediately
| confirm it.
| kube-system wrote:
| Is there a motivating factor for providing a reference in
| Germany?
|
| My experience in the US is not necessarily that people
| are worried they're going to be sued, or that they
| couldn't make an objective reference, but that the effort
| and risk are both non-zero -- and the benefit to the
| company is ~zero.
| jabiko wrote:
| The motivating factor is that the employee simply has a
| right to a reference when leaving.
|
| Sometimes an employee might ask for an interim report
| (for example when changing departments, etc.) but that's
| something that is provided on a voluntarily basis.
| MandieD wrote:
| I thought employers had to provide a Zwischenzeugnis if
| you requested one. Maybe not...
| jabiko wrote:
| I just researched it a bit more. So while you don't have
| an entitlement to a Zwischenzeugnis per se, you are
| entitled if you have a "good reason" to request one.
| According to some judgements a "good reason" is for
| example a change of your superiors or if you want to
| apply for a job elsewhere.
|
| In my career I've requested quite a few Zwischenzeugnisse
| and never been denied. Probably a place where you have to
| fight to get one is not a place where you want to be
| employed anyways.
| MandieD wrote:
| Employers are legally required to give you a reference
| letter ("Zeugnis") when you leave, and also whenever you
| request one or are about to take a long leave
| ("Zwischenzeugnis") - I received one before I left for my
| year of maternity leave. Your prospective employers
| absolutely expect to see at least your most recent one,
| and I had a bit of fun explaining to the boss who hired
| me that all you'll ever get out of an American employer
| is dates of employment and job title.
|
| If you work here, keep up with them as carefully as you
| do your employment contracts.
|
| I have colleagues who habitually request a
| Zwischenzeugnis every 3-5 years, even if they're not
| currently looking for a new job.
| btilly wrote:
| Just because a legal letter said it, doesn't mean that it is
| true.
|
| I don't know German law. But I know that American lawyers
| send letters all the time threatening all sorts of things
| that would completely be laughed out of an actual court. It
| is generally easier to accept what the letter says than to
| fight it, so people just cave. As you apparently did. But if
| you know your rights and fight the letter, you'll generally
| win.
|
| So the fact that lawyers like to make people's lives
| miserable with threats doesn't necessarily mean that the laws
| are actually bad. They may also be bad, but lawyers manage to
| make things miserable on their own.
|
| That said, Germany has a long tradition of very strong
| privacy rights. It is (at least in theory) not whether or not
| you're saying something malicious, it is whether you can say
| it at all. This was a giant headache for Google Street View.
| You don't have to just blur out people, cars, and so on. You
| have to ask them whether they want their house blurred out as
| well - and lots said that they did!
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| What an exciting time we live in, deepfakes might be the death
| knell of "innocent until proven guilty".
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| it'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 wrote:
| Yeah, 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!
| rsecora wrote:
| If ChatGPT loses a defamation lawsuit, it immediately goes human
| and passes the Turing test.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| OpenAI is rapidly learning a lot about the legal systems of other
| nations.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I'm waiting for the legal battles over training data copyright.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| I'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.
| notahacker wrote:
| That'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..."
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