LibelGPT Microsoft’s AI chatbot Copilot falsely accused a journalist of committing some of the crimes he covered, The Register reports, in yet another example of AI hallucinations spitting out damaging but untrue information. The journalist, Martin Bernklau, a court reporter from Tubingen, Germany, said that the AI described him as an escapee from a psych ward, a convicted child molester, and a fraudster who preys on grieving widows. According to German public TV station Südwestrundfunk, which originally reported the incident, the chatbot also provided Bernklau’s full name and address, along with his phone number and a route planner to where he lived. “This seriously violates my human dignity,” Bernklau told SWR, translated from German by Google Translate. No Recourse In an attempt to see how his stories were doing online, Bernklau made the discovery after asking a version of Copilot, built into Microsoft’s search engine Bing, about himself. It appeared that the chatbot amalgamated Bernkalau’s decades’ worth of reporting on criminal trials and misconstrued him as the perpetrator. Bernklau filed a criminal complaint for slander, but was rejected by public prosecutors, who reasoned that no offense was committed because no real person could be considered the originator of the claims, according to SWR. He had more success after reaching out to data protection officers, but only marginally. “Microsoft promised the data protection officer of the Free State of Bavaria that the fake content would be deleted,” Bernklau told The Register. “However, that only lasted three days. It now seems that…AI Accuses Journalist of Escaping Psych Ward, Abusing Children and Widows