this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
767 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
68066 readers
4237 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.