Test case tanks

While headlines have been made by Ben Roberts-Smith's appeal and Lisa Wilkinson’s battle for Ten to cover her legal costs in the Lehrmann defamation action, an unsual report on a Victorian mayor also slipped into the news.

Last year, the Mayor of Hepburn Shire, north west of Melbourne took the first steps in an action against ChatGPT’s owner, OpenAI. On one level, Brian Hood’s claim was on the scale of the great mistaken identity cases.  When asked about Hood’s role in the Securency scandal over 10 years ago, ChatGPT apparently said he was ‘involved in the payment of bribes’. In fact, as the SMH explained, Hood was the whistleblower in that case, and his courage was commended by the Victorian Supreme Court.

Many would say this is exactly the kind of thing defamation law is there to address. But it seems the complexities of defamation law, the practicalities of cross-border disputes with a corporate opponent, and the realities of fast-changing tech caused the mayor to re-think. In reports last week, he acknowledged that fighting the US-based corporate would be difficult. So, too, the task of proving publication to anyone other than the initial user, or at least to an audience large enough to support substantial damages. More happily, it seems OpenAI has fixed the real problem at least in one sense - that ChatGPT 4.0 does not deliver the erroneous content. And the attention generated by Hood’s actions in calling out the errors generated by genAI have gone some way towards repairing any damage to his reputation. It may well be that the whole episode damaged OpenAI’s reputation – albeit temporarily – more than Mayor Hood’s. 

Derek Wilding, CMT Co-Director