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A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. (www.niemanlab.org)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

142 comments fedilink hide all child comments

When German journalist Martin Bernklautyped his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his articles would be picked up by the chatbot, the answers horrified him. Copilot’s results asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser, and a conman preying on widowers. For years, Bernklau had served as a courts reporter and the AI chatbot had falsely blamed him for the crimes whose trials he had covered.

The accusations against Bernklau weren’t true, of course, and are examples of generative AI’s “hallucinations.” These are inaccurate or nonsensical responses to a prompt provided by the user, and they’re alarmingly common. Anyone attempting to use AI should always proceed with great caution, because information from such systems needs validation and verification by humans before it can be trusted.

But why did Copilot hallucinate these terrible and false accusations?

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[+] [email protected] -17 points 1 month ago (16 children)

I don't think they should be liable for what their text generator generates. I think people should stop treating it like gospel. At most, they should be liable for misrepresenting what it can do.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (4 children)

If they aren’t liable for what their product does, who is? And do you think they’ll be incentivized to fix their glorified chat boxes if they know they won’t be held responsible for if?

[+] [email protected] -11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Their product doesn't claim to be a source of facts. It's a generator of human-sounding text. It's great for that purpose and they're not liable for people misusing it or not understanding what it does.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

So you think these companies should have no liability for the misinformation they spit out. Awesome. That’s gonna end well. Welcome to digital snake oil, y’all.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago

I did not say companies should have no liability for publishing misinformation. Of course if someone uses AI to generate misinformation and tries to pass it off as factual information they should be held accountable. But it doesn't seem like anyone did that in this case. Just a journalist putting his name in the AI to see what it generates. Nobody actually spread those results as fact.

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