AI and Defamation: Legal Implications

From April 26, 2023: If someone lies about you, you can usually sue them for defamation. But what if that someone is ChatGPT? Already in Australia, the mayor of a town outside Melbourne has threatened to sue OpenAI because ChatGPT falsely named him a guilty party in a bribery scandal. Could that happen in America? Does our libel law allow that? What does it even mean for a large language model to act with "malice"? Does the First Amendment put any limits on the ability to hold these models, and the companies that make them, accountable for false statements they make? And what's the best way to deal with this problem: private lawsuits or government regulation?

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem, Alan Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and Senior Editor at Lawfare, discussed these questions with First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA and the author of a draft paper entitled "Large Libel Models.”

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