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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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.