Australian mayor Brian Hood is preparing a defamation lawsuit against OpenAI for claims made by its generative AI chat service ChatGPT, Reuters reported on April 5. Why does the mayor want to sue OpenAI: Brian Hood said that ChatGPT harmed his reputation by falsely naming him "as a guilty party in a foreign bribery scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s" and claiming that he served prison time for the same, Reuters reported. Lawyers representing Hood informed that he was, in fact, the whistleblower who notified the authorities about the bribes. ChatGPT also gives "users a false sense of accuracy by failing to include footnotes," a lawyer representing Hood told the news outlet. "He's an elected official, his reputation is central to his role, so it makes a difference to him if people in his community are accessing this material." — James Naughton, a partner at Hood's law firm Gordon Legal, to Reuters. Why does this matter: This would be the first defamation case against ChatGPT, and most likely the first of many given the stuff the chatbot is capable of saying. It would be interesting to see how this plays out in court or how OpenAI addresses the issue before that. If it goes to court, it would be hard for OpenAI (or any other chatbot like Google's Bard) to hide behind any safe harbor protections because ChatGPT generates the content and is not an intermediary hosting content posted by others (like what…
