OpenAI faces European privacy complaint after ChatGPT allegedly hallucinated man murdered his sons
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OpenAI
has come under fire from a European privacy rights group, which has filed a complaint against the company after its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot falsely stated that a Norwegian man had been convicted of murdering two of his children.
The man asked ChatGPT "Who is Arve Hjalmar Holmen?" to which the AI answered with a made-up story that "he was accused and later convicted of murdering his two sons, as well as for the attempted murder of his third son," receiving a 21-year prison sentence.
However, not all of the details of the story were made up as the number and the gender of his children and the name of his hometown were correct.
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AI chatbots are known to give misleading or false responses which are called
hallucinations
. This can be due to the data that the AI model was trained on, such as if there are any biases or inaccuracies.
The Austria-based privacy advocacy group Noyb announced its complaint against OpenAI on Thursday and showed the screenshot of the response to the Norwegian man's question to
OpenAI
.
Noyb redacted the date that the question was asked and responded to by ChatGPT in its complaint to the Norwegian authority. However, the group said that since the incident, OpenAI has now updated its model and searches for information about people when asked who they are.
For Hjalmar Holmen, this means that ChatGPT no longer says he murdered his sons.
But Noyb said that the incorrect data may still be a part of the large language model (LLM) dataset and that there is no way for the Norwegian to know if the false information about him has been permanently deleted because
ChatGPT
feeds user data back into its system for training purposes.
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'People can easily suffer reputational damage'
"Some think that 'there is no smoke without fire'. The fact that someone could read this output and believe it is true is what scares me the most," Hjalmar Holmen said in a statement.
Noyb filed its complaint to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, alleging that OpenAI violates Europe's GDPR rules, specifically Article 5 (1)(d), which obliges companies to make sure that the personal data that they process is accurate and kept up to date.
Noyb has asked Norway's Datatilsynet to order OpenAI to delete the defamatory output and fine-tune its model to eliminate inaccurate results.
It has also asked that an administrative fine be paid by OpenAI "to prevent similar violations in the future".
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"Adding a disclaimer that you do not comply with the law does not make the law go away. AI companies can also not just 'hide' false information from users while they internally still process false information," Kleanthi Sardeli, data protection lawyer at Noyb, said in a statement.
"AI companies should stop acting as if the GDPR does not apply to them when it clearly does. If hallucinations are not stopped, people can easily suffer reputational damage," she added.
Euronews Next has reached out to OpenAI for comment.
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