Deloitte will refund Australian government for AI hallucination-filled report

Consulting firm quietly admitted to GPT-4o use after fake citations were found in August.

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[hillspuck]

Perhaps Lisa Crawford has a case for defamation or slander for having these false papers attributed to her. One way to stop the nonsense is to make it hurt. As it airs they are partially refunding the money but clearly all they did is engineer a few AI prompts to get the report. Make them refund it all, make them pay for defamation and send a message that this crap isn’t okay.

Same for the lawyers who submit briefs to the court with fake legal citations.

While I am in favor of sticking it to people who use AI like this in any way possible, I think you'd probably find it hard to make the case that it's "defaming" her. Unless the made up papers are about her doing experiments on humans or something of that magnitude. While it's wrong, if someone cited a fake paper I wrote on an inconclusive drug trial, it'd be hard to show that it had somehow damaged my reputation.

Edit: Due to the number of downvotes, I have to wonder if I just put my point across poorly or if there's just a bunch of AI defenders downvoting. My point is that the law as it is written today in most countries requires defaming to somehow damage someone's reputation. That's what I'm saying would be hard to prove in this case. I'm all for the AI companies being charged with fraud for knowing that their software is riddled with bad output.

 

[hillspuck]

Perhaps there's a claim under right of publicity or fraud.

It's unfortunate that the law is relatively tolerant about falsehoods, even when they are deliberate or (as here) clearly negligent. That's left us very unprepared for the modern age.

Yeah, I think there should be an all-new law based on it. Fraud could work, but only for the people who were paying AI for their services. It wouldn't do anything for the people that the AI cited in its output.

Though I think fraud requires intentional deception. I feel like this is more negligent deception (layperson using the word, so don't take that as the actual legal definition of "negligence.") I think these people really do think the AI would produce accurate output, or they would never pay for it and try to pass it off as legit.

The makers of AI, on the other hand, have more than enough evidence to know that any output by their software is likely to have errors. It feels like there's some possibility of making fraud stick there if they know that and still get people to use it.

 

[hillspuck]

From your other post, a common type of damage to allege in defamation suits is reputational harm, and she could likely argue that her name associated with a fraudulent paper is reputationally damaging here in the US. Her higher bar might be showing that it was at least negligence to list her as the author.

But do you think you could show that just having her cited in a paper was damaging (especially when it was one of numerous citations) as opposed to something like claiming she was a co-author of the paper?