Australian Mayor Readies the World’s First Defamation Case Against ChatGPT

According to the Australian Minister, ChatGPT has been falsely claiming that the minister has served time in prison for a bribery case

A regional Australian mayor named Brian Hood says that he may soon file a defamation case against ChatGPT, a move that will make him the world’s first person to file a case against an AI product.

Brian Hood, who is the mayor of Hepburn Shire, a town just 120 km northwest of Melbourne, started preparing for this defamation case when ChatGPT continuously made false claims about him serving prison time over involvement in a bribery case.

According to Hood, a lot of his friends and family reached out to him and explained how ChatGPT is making false claims about his involvement in a foreign bribery scandal, which took place at the Reserve Bank of Australia in early 2000s.

Now the irony of the situation is the fact that Mayor Hood was the person that helped solve the exact bribery case by notifying authorities, but courtesy to ChatGPT, has now ended up being called the guilty party of the case.

Mayor Hood, who at the time worked for Note Printing Australia, was actually the person who investigated bribery and notified authorities about the bribe payments. Throughout this case, Hood was never charged for a crime, but was in fact awarded with currency printing contracts.

Before announcing his intentions to filing a defamation case and suing the creators of ChatGPT, Mayor Hood’s legal team sent out a letter to OpenAI, requesting for changes in the information and giving them a 28 days deadline.

It has been around 15 days since Mayor Hood’s legal team has sent out the letter, but OpenAI has not responded to the request, nor has the company made changes to the falsely claimed bribery case details.

If OpenAI continues to ignore the request and Hood’s legal team goes on with the defamation case, it would turn into a historical case, where Mayor Hood will become the first person to file a case against an AI chatbot.

“It would potentially be a landmark moment in the sense that it’s applying this defamation law to a new area of artificial intelligence and publication in the IT space,” said James Naughton, a partner at Mayor Hood’s law firm ‘Gordon Legal’.

“He’s an elected official, his reputation is central to his role, so it makes a difference to him if people in his community are accessing this material,” added Naughton.

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