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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
