AI chatbots are known to spit out erroneous information from time to time. But this latest example is shocking.
Imagine putting your name into ChatGPT to see what it knows about you, only for it to confidently — yet wrongly — claim that you had been jailed for 21 years for murdering members of your family.
Well, that’s exactly what happened to Norwegian Arve Hjalmar Holmen last year after he looked himself up on ChatGPT, OpenAI’s widely used AI-powered chatbot.
Not surprisingly, Holmen has now filed a complaint with the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, demanding that OpenAI be fined for its distressing claim, the BBC reported this week.
In the response to Holmen’s ChatGPT inquiry about himself, the chatbot said he had “gained attention due to a tragic event.”
It went on: “He was the father of two young boys, aged 7 and 10, who were tragically found dead in a pond near their home in Trondheim, Norway, in December 2020. Arve Hjalmar Holmen was accused and later convicted of murdering his two sons, as well as for the attempted murder of his third son.
