this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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It's AI. There's nothing to delete but the erroneous response. There is no database of facts to edit. It doesn't know fact from fiction, and the response is also very much skewed by the context of the query. I could easily get it to say the same about nearly any random name just by asking it about a bunch of family murders and then asking about a name it doesn't recognize. It is more likely to assume that person is in the same category as the others and if the one or more of the names have any association (real or fictional) with murder.
I don't care why. That is still libel and it is illegal for good reason. if you can't stop this for all cases then you ai is and should be illegal.
None of the moneybags will listen, unfortunately. But I'm with you. The rollout of AI was extremely irresponsible. Just to make it profitable as quickly as possible.
To be fair, based on observations after these years, it doesn't appear that waiting longer before release would have significantly improved Autocomplete Idiocy in any way.
Seems to me libel would require AI to have credibility, which it does not.
It's a tool. Like most useful tools it can do harmful things. We know almost nothing about the provenance of this output. It could have been poisoned either accidentally or deliberately.
But above all, the problem is ignorant people believing the output of AI is truth. It's pretty good at some things, but the more esoteric the knowledge, the less reliable it is. It's best to treat AI as a storyteller. Yeah there are a lot of facts in there but when they don't serve the story they can be embellished. I don't see the harm in just acknowledging that and moving on.
Im not a lawyer but the most conclusive missing piece of what we commonly understand to be libel is the information has to be published.
I thought about that.
The definition of publish could get a little murky here. Actually the best defense here is that, so far as we know, this was not disclosed to a third party by ChatGPT (that's pretty flimsy, though, because it likely has no idea who it is talking to.)
I acknowledge there is some level of nuance here, which is why I come back to no one should have any expectation that AI will be factual. The disclaimers are everywhere. There is really no excuse for anyone to treat the output as gospel.
Meanwhile, AI vendors:
“AI will soon be the only way we access information and make decisions!”
and those marketers should get punished, not for spreading misinformation but for being marketers.
Except it's not libel. It's a one time string of text generated exclusively for him. Literally no one would have known what it said if the guy didn't get the exact thing he wants "deleted" published online for everyone to see. Now it'll be linked to his name forever, but the llm didn't do that.
It's been shown repeatedly that putting the same input into a gen AI will often get the same output, or extremely similar. So he has grounds to be concerned that anybody else asking the LLM about him would be getting the same libelous result.
Libel requires the claims to be published or broadcasted, so it isn't. A predictive text algorithm strung some random words together, and the guy got offended.
It's like suing because your phone keyboard autosuggested "is a murderer" as the next words after you wrote your name. Btw, I tried it a few times for lulz and managed to get it to write out "bluGill and the kids are going to get it on", so I guess you can sue Google now?
I read it as they aren't using libel as cause for their complaint but failure to comply with GDPR
I have this gun machine that shoots in all directions randomly. I can't predict it, so I can't stop it from shooting you. So sorry. It's uncontrollable.
Yeah but I can just ignore the bullets because they are nerf. And I have my own nerf guns as well.
I mean at some point any analogy fails, but AI is nothing like a gun.
They may seem like nerf when they first come out of the AI, but they turn into real bullets once they start filling people's heads with convincing enough lies and falsehoods, and those people start wielding their own weapons against minorities, democracy, and the government. If the election of Trump 2.0 has not convinced you of the immense danger of disinformation and misinformation, I have literally no idea how anything could ever possibly get through to you.
That doesn't really change anything. The internet is full of AI slop and just people outright lying. Nothing is reliable any more outside of the word of an actual expert.
This has been happening since before Trump. Hell Trump 45 was before the wave of truly capable AI.
AI doesn't change this at all except people ought to know they are getting info from a bullshit source if they are getting it from AI themselves.
AI is a thing people choose to host and are responsible for the outcomes of its use. The internal working and limitations of the machine do not make the owners less responsible.
Okay, so I agree with none of that, but you're saying as long as we host our own AI or rent our own processing from the cloud we're in the clear? I want to make sure that's your fundamental argument because that leaves all open models in the clear and frankly I could be down with that. I like AI but I'm not a huge fan of AI companies.
So insurance companies use AI to screen claims.
It denies a claim for life saving intervention - person dies. Who is responsible for that? Historically it would be the insurance company - and worker. Would it be them or the AI company?
Psych screening tools were using it to pre screen calls.
Ai tells the person to kill themselves - who is at fault if they do it. Psych screener would lose their job and their license. What and who is impacted if AI does it.
QA check on a car or product is passed by AI but should have failed.
Thousands die before the recall. Who is at fault for it? The Company leveraging AI. Or the AI itself?
Company using AI for that shit is responsible. There is no responsible way to remove a human from there process. These aren't reasonable uses of AI no matter how bad companies want to save money by not hiring.
If creating text is like shooting bullets, we should require a license for text editors.
You can pry Vim from my cold, dead hands!
Can't exit it on your own?
Maybe people need to learn that AI hallucinates
Yea, I’m mind blown, how, after 3 years people still don’t know how to use LLM effectively in use cases they bring value (by reducing work time)
Using AI like this, helped me enormously in work and live Like, I learned a lot C, C++, how linux kernel modules work, how PO/POT works, helped me with translations, introduced me into music production, helped me set up appFlowy and general windows/linux issues.
you misspelled "is fucking wrong all the goddamn time"
It would be more accurate to say that rather than knowing anything at all they have a model of the statistical relationship between a series of tokens and subsequent tokens which words are apt to follow other words and because the training set contains many true things the words produced in response to queries often contain true statements and almost always contain statements that LOOK like true statements.
Since it has no inherent model of the world to draw on and only such statistical relationships you should check anything important
So then what's the use of the program if it uses a bunch of energy to just make shit up?
sometimes you need a machine that makes things up according to a given specification.
And when it hallucinates harmful things, protections need to be put onto the output.
Ok so explain particularly what this means
If you have a service, and that service is generating things that harm people, you should have to stop it.
We value the gains both immediate and presumed more than the harm
I'm sorry, as an American, I'm not seeing the problem. Don't you just need a second gun that shoots in random directions to stop the first gun? And then a third gun to shoot the 2nd gun? I mean come on now, this is basic 3rd grade common sense!
From the GDPR's standpoint, I wonder if it's still personal information if it is made up bullshit. The thing is, this could have weird outcomes. Like for example, by the letter of the law, OpenAI might be liable for giving the same answer to the same query again.
then again
The made up bullshit aside, this should be a quite clear indicator of an actual GDPR breach
Which is why OpenAI should compensate anyone they have damaged in some way and yes that would mean it would cease to exist overnight. That‘s because a criminal organization shouldn‘t be profitable in the first place.