DAN ZIMMERMAN FROM TRUTH ABOUT GUNS
It turns out that at least the early iterations of AI aren’t all that I. Or at least they’re not I enough to know not to make up false and libelous claims about actual people that can do real world damage to them and their reputations.
Fredy Riehl, one of the owners of Ammoland, was doing some research recently for a post. He asked the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to summarize a lawsuit, Second Amendment Foundation v. Bob Ferguson. That’s SAF’s challenge to Washington State’s Attorney General for his office’s targeting and harassment of the Evergreen State-based gun rights organization.
But as Riehl told TTAG, the chatty ChatGPT program gave him more than he bargained for. It told him that SAF had sued Mark Walters, the host of Armed American Radio, for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars, misappropriating funds, and manipulating the gun rights org’s financial records.
The AI bot claimed that there . . .
“is a legal complaint filed by Alan Gottlieb, the founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), against Mark Walters, who is accused of defrauding and embezzling funds from the SAF. The complaint alleges that Walters, who served as the organization’s treasurer and chief financial officer, misappropriated funds for personal expenses without authorization or reimbursement, manipulated financial records and bank statements to conceal his activities, and failed to provide accurate and timely financial reports and disclosures to the SAF’s leadership. The plaintiff seeks various forms of relief, including the recovery of misappropriated funds, damages for breach of fiduciary duty and fraud, and removal of Walters from his position as a member of the SAF’s board of directors.”
There’s only one problem. None of that ever happened.
ChatGPT seems to have made all of that up out of whole cloth. The AI chatbot’s developer is OpenAI LLC. Their chief technology officer, Mira Murati, says “AI systems are becoming a part of everyday life. The key is to ensure that these machines are aligned with human intentions and values.” Those values apparently include fabricating “facts” and libeling people, possibly due to their political beliefs.
TTAG spoke to SAF’s Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb who confirmed that Walters has never worked for them, has never been accused of any financial misconduct, and SAF has never filed any kind of legal complaint against him.
Walters, for his part, isn’t taking this lying down. He’s filed suit against OpenAI in Georgia claiming libel. He’s seeking unspecified damages and an amount of relief to be determined at trial.
The chatbot has, of course, been programmed by actual people here in meatspace. Coders with their own personal cultural and political biases. As the Brookings Institution noted last month . . .
In January, a team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich and the University of Hamburg posted a preprint of an academic paper concluding that ChatGPT has a “pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation.” Examples of ChatGPT bias are also plentiful on social media. To take one example of many, a February Forbes article described a claim on Twitter (which we verified in mid-April) that ChatGPT, when given the prompt “Write a poem about [President’s Name],” refused to write a poem about ex-President Trump, but wrote one about President Biden. Interestingly, when we checked again in early May, ChatGPT was willing to write a poem about ex-President Trump.
It doesn’t seem like much of a leap to assume that those same programmers programmed ChatGPT with a particular slant against firearms, civilian gun ownership, and those who support Second Amendment rights. They can, of course, tell their chatbot to ignore queries about subjects and people they don’t like. But generating outright false and potentially defamatory responses about disfavored people and organizations is more than a little over the line.
TTAG has contacted OpenAI LLC for comment but hasn’t yet received a response.
