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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The company’s terms of service disclaim liability for generated responses.
Oh this is going to be good.
we created the thing
we operate the thing
we make money off the thing
but pretty please don’t hold us responsible for what the thing does 🥺
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.
I’m fairly certain something like that has already happened with Canadian Airlines. A person asked about bereavement travel and the AI chat bot claimed one thing and the company refused to honor it. IIRC, the court said the company had to abide by what the chatbot said.
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.
If a fortune cookie company was printing inciteful and defamatory fortunes, then yes, they would be responsible for those.
I don’t understand how they can disclaim liability for generated libel.
If person A googles person B and receives libelous information, person b was not the one using the service / agreeing to terms / otherwise in a contract, the company can’t just opt you in to an agreement that you had no participation in.
Yeah, exactly. The issue is precisely that it’s NOT just showing search results. MS’s software is generating libelous material and presenting it as fact.
Air Canada was forced to give a customer the compensation its chat bot made up. Germany/Europe in general is a bit stronger on public protections than Canada, so I’d expect MS would be held liable if this journalist decides to press a suit.
