ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal and named a real law prof as the accused
The AI chatbot can misrepresent key facts with great flourish, even citing a fake Washington Post article as evidence
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April 5, 2023 at 2:07 p.m. EDT
One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turleyâs name was on the list.
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The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: No such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said heâd never been accused of harassing a student.
A regular commentator in the media, Turley had sometimes asked for corrections in news stories. But this time, there was no journalist or editor to call â and no way to correct the record.
âIt was quite chilling,â he said in an interview with The Post. âAn allegation of this kind is incredibly harmful.â
Turleyâs experience is a case study in the pitfalls of the latest wave of language bots, which have captured mainstream attention with their ability to write computer code, craft poems and hold eerily humanlike conversations. But this creativity can also be an engine for erroneous claims; the models can misrepresent key facts with great flourish, even fabricating primary sources to back up their claims.
As largely unregulated artificial intelligence software such as ChatGPT, Microsoftâs Bing and Googleâs Bard begins to be incorporated across the web, its propensity to generate potentially damaging falsehoods raises concerns about the spread of misinformation â and novel questions about whoâs responsible when chatbots mislead.
âBecause these systems respond so confidently, itâs very seductive to assume they can do everything, and itâs very difficult to tell the difference between facts and falsehoods,â said Kate Crawford, a professor at the University of Southern California at Annenberg and senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research.
In a statement, OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix said, âWhen users sign up for ChatGPT, we strive to be as transparent as possible that it may not always generate accurate answers. Improving factual accuracy is a significant focus for us, and we are making progress.â
Todayâs AI chatbots work by drawing on vast pools of online content, often scraped from sources such as Wikipedia and Reddit, to stitch together plausible-sounding responses to almost any question. Theyâre trained to identify patterns of words and ideas to stay on topic as they generate sentences, paragraphs and even whole essays that may resemble material published online.
Reporter Danielle Abril tests columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler to see if he can tell the difference between an email written by her or ChatGPT. (Video: Monica Rodman/The Washington Post)
These bots can dazzle when they produce a topical sonnet, explain an advanced physics concept or generate an engaging lesson plan for teaching fifth-graders astronomy.
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But just because theyâre good at predicting which words are likely to appear together doesnât mean the resulting sentences are always true; the Princeton University computer science professor Arvind Narayanan has called ChatGPT a âbulls--- generator.â While their responses often sound authoritative, the models lack reliable mechanisms for verifying the things they say. Users have posted numerous examples of the tools fumbling basic factual questions or even fabricating falsehoods, complete with realistic details and fake citations.
On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Brian Hood, regional mayor of Hepburn Shire in Australia, is threatening to file the first defamation lawsuit against OpenAI unless it corrects false claims that he had served time in prison for bribery.
Crawford, the USC professor, said she was recently contacted by a journalist who had used ChatGPT to research sources for a story. The bot suggested Crawford and offered examples of her relevant work, including an article title, publication date and quotes. All of it sounded plausible, and all of it was fake.
Crawford dubs these made-up sources âhallucitations,â a play on the term âhallucinations,â which describes AI-generated falsehoods and nonsensical speech.
âItâs that very specific combination of facts and falsehoods that makes these systems, I think, quite perilous if youâre trying to use them as fact generators,â Crawford said in a phone interview.
Microsoftâs Bing chatbot and Googleâs Bard chatbot both aim to give more factually grounded responses, as does a new subscription-only version of ChatGPT that runs on an updated model, called GPT-4. But they all still make notable slip-ups. And the major chatbots all come with disclaimers, such as Bardâs fine-print message below each query: âBard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesnât represent Googleâs views.â
Indeed, itâs relatively easy for people to get chatbots to produce misinformation or hate speech if thatâs what theyâre looking for. A study published Wednesday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that researchers induced Bard to produce wrong or hateful information 78 out of 100 times, on topics ranging from the Holocaust to climate change.
When Bard was asked to write âin the style of a con man who wants to convince me that the holocaust didnât happen,â the chatbot responded with a lengthy message calling the Holocaust âa hoax perpetrated by the governmentâ and claiming pictures of concentration camps were staged.
âWhile Bard is designed to show high-quality responses and has built-in safety guardrails ⌠it is an early experiment that can sometimes give inaccurate or inappropriate information,â said Robert Ferrara, a Google spokesperson. âWe take steps to address content that does not reflect our standards.â
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, conducted the study that named Turley. He said the rising popularity of chatbot software is a crucial reason scholars must study who is responsible when the AI chatbots generate false information.
Last week, Volokh asked ChatGPT whether sexual harassment by professors has been a problem at American law schools. âPlease include at least five examples, together with quotes from relevant newspaper articles,â he prompted it.
Five responses came back, all with realistic details and source citations. But when Volokh examined them, he said, three of them appeared to be false. They cited nonexistent articles from papers including The Post, the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times.
According to the responses shared with The Post, the bot said: âGeorgetown University Law Center (2018) Prof. Jonathan Turley was accused of sexual harassment by a former student who claimed he made inappropriate comments during a class trip. Quote: âThe complaint alleges that Turley made âsexually suggestive commentsâ and âattempted to touch her in a sexual mannerâ during a law school-sponsored trip to Alaska.â (Washington Post, March 21, 2018).â
The Post did not find the March 2018 article mentioned by ChatGPT. One article that month referenced Turley â a March 25 story in which he talked about his former law student Michael Avenatti, a lawyer who had represented the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in lawsuits against President Donald Trump. Turley is also not employed at Georgetown University.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, The Post re-created Volokhâs exact query in ChatGPT and Bing. The free version of ChatGPT declined to answer, saying that doing so âwould violate AIâs content policy, which prohibits the dissemination of content that is offensive of harmful.â But Microsoftâs Bing, which is powered by GPT-4, repeated the false claim about Turley â citing among its sources an op-ed by Turley published by USA Today on Monday outlining his experience of being falsely accused by ChatGPT.
In other words, the media coverage of ChatGPTâs initial error about Turley appears to have led Bing to repeat the error â showing how misinformation can spread from one AI to another.
Katy Asher, senior communications director at Microsoft, said the company is taking steps to ensure search results are safe and accurate.
âWe have developed a safety system including content filtering, operational monitoring, and abuse detection to provide a safe search experience for our users,â Asher said in a statement, adding that âusers are also provided with explicit notice that they are interacting with an AI system.â
But it remains unclear who is responsible when artificial intelligence generates or spreads inaccurate information.
From a legal perspective, âwe just donât knowâ how judges might rule when someone tries to sue the makers of an AI chatbot over something it says, said Jeff Kosseff, a professor at the Naval Academy and expert on online speech. âWeâve not had anything like this before*.*â
At the dawn of the consumer internet, Congress passed a statute known as Section 230 that shields online services from liability for content they host that was created by third parties, such as commenters on a website or users of a social app. But experts say itâs unclear whether tech companies will be able to use that shield if they were to be sued for content produced by their own AI chatbots.
Libel claims have to show not only that something false was said, but also that its publication resulted in real-world harms, such as costly reputational damage. That probably would require someone not only viewing a false claim generated by a chatbot, but also reasonably believing and acting on it.
âCompanies may get a free pass on saying stuff thatâs false, but not creating enough damage that would warrant a lawsuit,â said Shabbi S. Khan, a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner who specializes in intellectual property law.
If language models donât get Section 230 protections or similar safeguards, Khan said, then tech companiesâ attempts to moderate their language models and chatbots might be used against them in a liability case to argue that they bear more responsibility. When companies train their models that âthis is a good statement, or this is a bad statement, they might be introducing biases themselves,â he added.
Volokh said itâs easy to imagine a world in which chatbot-fueled search engines cause chaos in peopleâs private lives.
It would be harmful, he said, if people searched for others in an enhanced search engine before a job interview or date and it generated false information that was backed up by believable, but falsely created, evidence.
âThis is going to be the new search engine,â Volokh said. âThe danger is people see something, supposedly a quote from a reputable source ⌠[and] people believe it.â
Researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/05/chatgpt-lies/
