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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So just to be clear, if you can sue companies for this, there is no open source scene and we end up with only Microsoft and Google in the game since they will be the only one able to eat the fines.
There’s no easy way to solve this problem, especially with the tech being so recent and the scope so big. In any case, it’s user error. Llms aren’t expected to be right at all times, especially when it’s a coding model about obscure journalists. They are tools to help the user, and every step requires verification from the user.
They aren’t a replacement for truth, they can’t stand in for wikipedia and news articles, they aren’t meant to be cited in papers, etc.
What do you mean by ‘there’s no open source scene’?
I don’t understand what open source has to do with this.