For the first time, OpenAI may face a lawsuit over ChatGPT-generated defamation. The accuser? An Australian mayor named Brian Hood, who according to Reuters is peeved about the fact that ChatGPT wrongfully identified him as a guilty party in a “foreign bribery scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s,” apparently claiming that Hood had even served prison time for his so-called crime. Hood was involved in the scandal — but as the whistleblower, not the crime-doer. Yeah, we’d be pissed, too. Per Reuters, Hood’s lawyers sent a “letter of concern” to OpenAI back on March 21 demanding that the company fix its chatbot’s error within 28 days. If they don’t, Hood says he’s suing. “It would potentially be a landmark moment in the sense that it’s applying this defamation law to a new area of artificial intelligence and publication in the IT space,” James Naughton, a partner at Hood’s law firm Gordon Legal, told Reuters. “He’s an elected official, his reputation is central to his role,” he continued. “It makes a difference to him if people in his community are accessing this material.” It’s a fascinating case, and if Hood does sue, it’ll be interesting to see how the mayor’s argument holds up in court. ChatGPT and similar large language model-powered bots make things up all the time — they’re predictive devices, not analytical ones, and though they do sometimes get their predictions right, they’re also often wrong. And while OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s…OpenAI Threatened With Lawsuit Over ChatGPT Defamation