Language models generate text based on statistical probabilities. This led to serious false accusations against a veteran court reporter by Microsoft's Copilot.

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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  • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    4 months ago

    I mean I’m not a lawyer but this is what I think is relevant here:

    1. This is a public service provided by Microsoft (or whoever really)
    2. It prints libel
    3. They’re responsible for the libel it prints as it’s not user generated content (I think there’s a law about that that excludes specifically this so running social media sites is viable)

    I really don’t think it matters whether what’s behind it is an LLM or an underpaid Indian writing the text in real time or if it’s just static pages the site owner wrote. They’re still responsible for it.

    If you run it locally, none of it is public (until you publish what it generated, in which case you’re responsible for the content).