AI chatbot ChatGPT, as part of a research study, mistakenly put an innocent and well-respected law professor in the United States on a list of legal experts who had previously sexually abused students.
Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, was horrified to see that ChatGPT had included him in a study on legal academics who had harassed someone sexually.
“ChatGPT recently published a false story accusing me of sexually assaulting students,” Turley said in a tweet.
In an editorial post for USA Today, he said that he received an odd email from a colleague law professor concerning research he conducted on ChatGPT about sexual harassment by academics.
“The programme promptly reported that I had been accused of sexual harassment in a 2018 Washington Post article after groping law students on a trip to Alaska,” Turley said.
He has never traveled to Alaska with students, and The Washington Post has never published such an article.
Turley maintained that he had “never been accused of sexual harassment or assault by anyone.”
“What’s most striking is that this false accusation was ostensibly based on a Post article that never existed,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT falsely proclaimed that an Australian mayor had been imprisoned for bribery.
The mayor of Hepburn Shire, Brian Hood, has also vowed to sue ChatGPT maker OpenAI over the false accusations.
Turley believes that the use of AI and algorithms might give censorship a false veneer of science and objectivity.
According to Turley, the use of AI and algorithms can give censorship a false patina of science and objectivity.
“Even if people can prove, as in my case, that a story is false, companies can ‘blame it on the bot’ and promise only tweaks to the system,” he said.
