A Norwegian man said he was horrified to discover that ChatGPT outputs had falsely accused him of murdering his own children.
According to a complaint filed Thursday by European Union digital rights advocates Noyb, Arve Hjalmar Holmen decided to see what information ChatGPT might provide if a user searched his name. He was shocked when ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as “a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son,” a Noyb press release said.
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Plot twist: “Dad” isn’t even his real name.
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 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.
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
but it also mixed “clearly identifiable personal data”—such as the actual number and gender of Holmen’s children and the name of his hometown—with the “fake information,”
The made up bullshit aside, this should be a quite clear indicator of an actual GDPR breach
Maybe he has a insta profile with the name of his kids in his bio
How would that be a GDPR breach?
Maybe he has a insta profile with the name of his kids in his bio
Irrelevant. The data being public does not make it up for grabs.
‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’);
They store his personal data without his permission.
also
Information that is inaccurately attributed to a specific individual, be it factually incorrect or information that in reality is related to another individual, is still considered personal data as it relates to that specific individual. If data are inaccurate to the point that no individual can be identified, then the information is not personal data.
Storing it badly, does not make them excempt.
If you run an chatbot with with integrated web search, it garbs that info as a web crawler does, it does not mean that this data really is in the “knowledge/statistics” of the AI itself.
Nobody stores the information if it is like this, it is only temporary used to generate that specific output.
(You can not use chatGPT without websearch on chatgpt domain (only if you self host, or use a service like DDG))
That’s a good point, that muddies the waters a bit. Makes it hard to say wether it’s spouting info from the web or if it’s data from the model.
I can’t comment on actual legality in this case, but I feel handling personal data like this, even from the open web, in a context where hallucinations are an overwhelming possibility, is still morally wrong. I don’t know the GDPR well enough to say wether it covers temporary information like this, but I kinda hope it does.
Lol, I definitely hope not 🤪 imagine a web without search engines, with GDPR counting for temporary information as well, it would not be feasible to offer.
Well, here we are. We skipped using this tech for only search Automation and leapfrogged to directly making shit up (once again).
To me it’s clear that these tools are primarily useful as bullshit generators, and I expect them to hallucinate and be inaccurate. But the companies trying to capitalize on the “AI” bubble are saying that these tools can be useful and accurate. I imagine OpenAI is going to have to invoke the Fox News defense in this case, and claim that “no reasonable person would take this seriously”.
Don’t use hallucinate to describe what it is doing, that is humanizing it and making the tech seem more advanced than it is. It is randomly mashing words together without understanding the meaning of any of them
