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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  • @Grimy
    0•4 months ago

    It would be relevant if Microsoft or any of the LLM companies presented their models outputs as truths. It’s been repeated multiple times that the outputs should be reviewed and verified. This is some serious “Reddit lied to me” vibes. Copilot literally says it uses AI and to check for mistake on the chat page.

    On top of that, these could be viewed as bugs. Can you actually imagine suing over bugs about a novel type of software that is realistically two years old? Though tbh it will be a long time before we reach tech that cannot make a mistake. The general public expectations are a bit ridiculous imo.