Eugene Volokh on AI Libel
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2023
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
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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Transcript
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| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | Generally speaking, defamation involves a statement |
| 0:37.0 | that would be reasonably perceived as a statement of fact. |
| 0:41.0 | It is false. |
| 0:43.0 | It is published. |
| 0:45.0 | And it is said at least negligently with regard to the falsehood. |
| 0:51.0 | Of course, famously for public officials and public figures, |
| 0:54.0 | it has to be shown in the so-called Actual Malice, |
| 0:56.0 | which is recklessness or knowledge, but for private figures, |
| 1:00.0 | generally speaking, it has to be. |
| 1:02.0 | There has to be a showing at least of mortgages. |
| 1:04.0 | So, again, we've talked about one thing, |
| 1:06.0 | would people reasonably perceive statements put out by GPD4's factual assertions. |
| 1:12.0 | I think he asks especially when they're in quotes. |
| 1:14.0 | Again, quotation marks are signals, important signals to human beings |
| 1:18.0 | that say, in most contexts, not in all contexts, most contexts, |
| 1:22.0 | this is actually drawn from some source. |
... |
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