Language models generate text based on statistical probabilities. This led to serious false accusations against a veteran court reporter by Microsoft's Copilot.

German journalist Martin Bernklau typed his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his culture blog articles would be picked up by the chatbot, according to German public broadcaster SWR.

The answers shocked Bernklau. Copilot falsely claimed Bernklau had been charged with and convicted of child abuse and exploiting dependents. It also claimed that he had been involved in a dramatic escape from a psychiatric hospital and had exploited grieving women as an unethical mortician.

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Bernklau believes the false claims may stem from his decades of court reporting in Tübingen on abuse, violence, and fraud cases. The AI seems to have combined this online information and mistakenly cast the journalist as a perpetrator.

Microsoft attempted to remove the false entries but only succeeded temporarily. They reappeared after a few days, SWR reports. The company’s terms of service disclaim liability for generated responses.

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  • orclev@lemmy.world
    3·
    26 days ago

    I really hope he sues them and establishes case law that companies are 100% responsible for all AI generated content. If we let them get away with this it’s only going to get worse from here.

    • phx@lemmy.ca
      1·
      26 days ago

      Within the context it’s presented I 100% agree with this. The airline case the AI was basically replacing a human agent/representative, so they were liable in the same way as if a human had provided the misinformation.

      In this case, it’s presenting details as fact as if they’d come from legit news sources etc. They should face the same penalty as a news agency would be libel.

      Now if it’s just an AI NPC in a game going a bit off the rails, that’s just entertainment. So long as nobody gets to pull the “we’re not really news, just entertainment” bullshit.

      • orclev@lemmy.world
        0·
        26 days ago

        Why? What possible downside is there in holding companies accountable for what they produce?

        • AeroLemming@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          26 days ago

          It’s not going to stop spammers and foreign disinformation campaigns. Making companies responsible for what their AI can generate without giving them the option to provide it as a no-liability no-guarantees tool is just going to make them clamp down harder on censoring and lobotomizing their models to make sure they’re incapable of making false claims even if it renders them semi-useless. I do think they should need to make it abundantly clear that their language models can and will lie and make stuff up.

          • orclev@lemmy.world
            2·
            24 days ago

            Existing law already covers that. Libel/slander only applies in cases that it appears you’re making a statement of fact. I can for instance say Trump gargles Putin’s balls once a month and as long as it’s clear from the context that this isn’t intended to be a statement of fact then it doesn’t qualify as defamation. Companies should be liable for what their AI outputs in the exact same way they’re liable for what their employees produce. If they want to not be held liable then they need to make sure their customers are properly informed that what they’re viewing might be complete bullshit. This means prominent notifications not a single line buried in paragraph 84 of their EULA.