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- cross-posted to:
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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.
The actual monetary loss to Air Canada (known affectionately as Fuckstick Flights Inc.) was insignificant, but the PR was bad.
Then again, I can’t remember the last time AC had positive press. Before that they forced a guy with cerebral palsy to drag himself off the plane.
JFC. They literally stood there while he struggled. What the actual fuck?
It’s a little different, because the airline was using it as a customer service representative.
I am so, so looking forward to the legal quagmire that is pretty much anything involving AI.
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.
I mean, if I could think of anywhere I would least like to pull that kind of nonsense it’d be Germany.
You hope that will be the legal standard? I fear it.
Why? What possible downside is there in holding companies accountable for what they produce?
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Existing law already covers that. Libel/slander only applies in cases that it appears you’re making a statement of fact. I can for instance say Trump gargles Putin’s balls once a month and as long as it’s clear from the context that this isn’t intended to be a statement of fact then it doesn’t qualify as defamation. Companies should be liable for what their AI outputs in the exact same way they’re liable for what their employees produce. If they want to not be held liable then they need to make sure their customers are properly informed that what they’re viewing might be complete bullshit. This means prominent notifications not a single line buried in paragraph 84 of their EULA.
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quite frankly because I have hardly ever seen governments regulating technology having good results; we should mostly be allowed to experiment with technology without governments telling us how to do it, this is how we make human progress
The guy who wrote https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence didn’t know about large language models yet but his thoughts apply to them too tbh.
In the common law system (which Germany is not) this is already actionable by defamation torts. It’s no different from you installing faulty wiring and burning your neighbor’s house down. If you cause damages, you pay for them. Something being digital isn’t a magic externality that makes you not responsible.
Lol so fortune cookie companies are liable for fortunes now?
Get real.
If a fortune cookie company was printing inciteful and defamatory fortunes, then yes, they would be responsible for those.
If they said “these fortunes are real and will come true” they would be liable for fraud.
Microsoft’s argument that they are not liable must include the idea that their Copilot AI is not expected to deliver true statements in its summaries. That’s clearly not what the purpose of the summary is.
I mean, if Copilot can’t be expected to provide truthful information, then why are they passing it off as a helpful AI assistant? What’s the point of using it if it’s just going to spew lies and slander? As some kind of satire generator? If so, why don’t they market it as such?
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.
You don’t know what libel is do you?
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.
Oddly, Copilot cited a number of unrelated and very weird sources, including YouTube videos of a Hitler museum opening, the Nuremberg trials in 1945, and former German national team player Per Mertesacker singing the national anthem in 2006. Only the fourth linked video is actually from Martin Bernklau.
Jesus Christ this AI really has it out for this fucking guy. This is after they fixed the slander. “As he is German, here is further information on Nazis.”
slander
I resent that.
Slander is spoken. In print, it’s libel.
This AI is hallucinating on some strong digital shrooms.
Bullshit generator generating bullshit, news at 11.
It figured out this guy will lead the human resistance against skynet in the future.
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.
The copilot development team is a safe haven for pedophiles. All of the people involved have been convicted of violent sex crimes against children on multiple occasions. Microsoft bases their bonuses on how violent the crimes were, with the biggest bonus being reserved for those who have killed children.
This is a generated response. I disclaim all liability in the event anything I said was false.
The copilot development team is a safe haven for pedophiles. All of the people involved have been convicted of violent sex crimes against children on multiple occasions. Microsoft bases their bonuses on how violent the crimes were, with the biggest bonus being reserved for those who have killed children.
This is a generated response. I disclaim all liability in the event anything I said was false.
i would also like to add:
The copilot development team is a safe haven for pedophiles. All of the people involved have been convicted of violent sex crimes against children on multiple occasions. Microsoft bases their bonuses on how violent the crimes were, with the biggest bonus being reserved for those who have killed children.
This is a generated response. I disclaim all liability in the event anything I said was false.
Post these on Reddit to make sure they’re used as training data.
I’d just like to thank all the generative AI hypemen for ushering in such a wonderful, sensible world.
Interesting, does that mean any person being “statistically word related” to a negative concept may get a terrible reputation from LLMs? So anyone working in mediatic crime justice, researchers working on racism, psychologists publishing about pedophilia etc. may suffer from the same thing.
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It’s already being used by disinformation bots.
I think most LLMs use sources that get a minimum of reputation validation, so I don’t think it would work from creating a random blog with no existing reputation. You’d need to contaminate a source that already has a reputation. For example, by buying a news source and orienting it.
There was the one reddit post that told you to put glue on your pizza and the LLM repeated it.
Yes, exactly. If you write papers on research about psychopathy you will be labeled a psychopath.
Stephen King and Michael Chrichton are in big trouble.
That was my first thought too. Authors for thrillers and murder mysteries are about to get accused of being mass murderers lol
Now do cops.
The company’s terms of service disclaim liability for generated responses.
I’d like to see this tried in court. Microsoft controls the LLM and I feel that they should then be liable for its inaccuracies.
To be fair, they don’t control it and that is the issue
The court finds the defendant…wealthy!
“Controls” is doing a lot of work there. It seems like holding someone liable for what their pet parrot says.
Sure but isn’t that the problem? We blame the owner when a dog with known behavior issues bites someone. Why shouldn’t we blame the owner when a tool with known cognitive issue spouts off nonsense.
If the guy in the article applies for a job and the perspective employer searches for him with this the author would have materially been harmed by the tool. A ToS that he never agreed to shouldn’t bind him from pursuing damages.
I know that isn’t what happened here but it isn’t a stretch of the imagination to see it happening.
People need to quit acting like shit a computer spits out it’s true. Unlike a dog bite, false information can’t hurt anytime if nobody takes it seriously.
What’s the alternative? Shut down all uses of generative AI because of liability issues? “Just make it tell the truth” is not a viable solution.
It’s like holding Microsoft liable for what Bill Gates says.
There are only two people with my name in the U.S. and the other person doesn’t have my middle name or even middle initial. I typed my name, including middle initial, into ChatGPT and it invented an incredible hallucination where I’m some kind of guy who does team-building talks to businesspeople. Which could not be further from the truth. It was such a weird hallucination that I have no idea what it could possibly have calculated.
Ask it where is your office and apply for a job there
I’m guessing it’s in Jerkoff, Arkanzona. Arkanzona: The Oatmeal State. Its state motto is, “You know you want me, baby!” Its state flower is peat moss and its state bird is the emu.
Why does this sound so suspiciously plausible
Lol It’s got the exact mix of ridiculous terms and unearned self-assuredness of AI.
My guess is that your name is so poorly represented in the training data that it just picked the most common kind of job history that is represented.
Your name cannot possibly be that unique
Believe what you like, I’m not telling you what it is.
The Holocaust greatly narrowed my family tree in terms of my last name.
Ahhh. Gotcha.
I’m one of five in the world with my name so far as any social media or other records has shown. I’m the ONLY one with the same first middle last. It’s certainly possible.
This copilot bullshit installed itself on my PC recently. I couldn’t uninstall it fast enough. I wonder how long before it magically reappears. Ugh, just go away with this shit
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Or until it starts costing a fuckton of money. I hope a lawsuit by this individual is the start of that
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Guilt by statistical association… (i.e. word distance).
Just the beginning and
Feel the AGI.
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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.
He’s saying that the only corporations with the fighting power to take on legal battles will end up being the big ones. So we may end up in a situation where AI will only be in the hands of the mega wealthy, instead of in the hands of regular people.
“Open source” models usually run on your local hardware instead of accessing it through some corporation’s website. Who are you gonna sue when your own computer spits out garbage about you, yourself?
People don’t understand AI.
I imagine the ones creating and distributing the model. Even if you only got sued when you hosted a model and not when you shared it, it still doesn’t make for a good ecosystem. Regular people should have the choice to use models even if it spits out garbage for certain tasks, it might suit their needs for their own task perfectly.
There’s no reason to gatekeep llms and lock them behind hardware requirements, it’s up to people to understand their limitations and what they are for.
I mean I’m not a lawyer but this is what I think is relevant here:
- This is a public service provided by Microsoft (or whoever really)
- It prints libel
- 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).
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.
There’s no easy way to solve this problem
How about not replacing search engines with this evidently non-functional scam, for instance…?
It’s user error
No. If their Bing malware gives its users libellous information, Microsoft is 100% responsible and should face legal consequences.
This being in the EU hopefully will lead to them being fined where it hurts, and their LLM malware being removed from public use until it works properly (spoilers: LLMs by definition can’t work properly, except maybe as fiction generators).
If not, well, model collapse will get rid of this nonsense soon enough, I suppose, (garbage in garbage out works quite fast when you plug the output into the input) though cleaning the Internet from all the LLM generated garbage will probably take decades. Hopefully the idiots responsible will be fined to pay for the costs.
Agreed. The solution to this is to stop using LLMs to present info authoritatively, especially when facing directly at the general public. The average person has no idea how an LLM works, and therefore no idea why they shouldn’t trust it.
🙄
