Month: April 2023

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Contributor | Photothek)

It was only a matter of time before ChatGPT—an artificial intelligence tool that generates responses based on user text prompts—was threatened with its first defamation lawsuit. That happened last month, Reuters reported today, when an Australian regional mayor, Brian Hood, sent a letter on March 21 to the tool’s developer, OpenAI, announcing his plan to sue the company for ChatGPT’s alleged role in spreading false claims that he had gone to prison for bribery.

To avoid the landmark lawsuit, Hood gave OpenAI 28 days to modify ChatGPT’s responses and stop the tool from spouting disinformation.

According to Hood’s legal team, ChatGPT could seriously damage the mayor’s reputation by falsely claiming that Hood had been convicted for taking part in a foreign bribery scandal in the early 2000s while working for a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Hood had worked for a subsidiary, Note Printing Australia, but rather than being found guilty of bribery, Hood was the one who notified authorities about the bribes. Reuters reported that Hood was never charged with any crimes, but ChatGPT seems to have confused the facts when generating some responses to text prompts inquiring about Hood's history.

Enlarge / NPR's Twitter account on April 5, 2023.

Twitter has branded NPR with the "state-affiliated media" tag applied to news organizations controlled by governments, contradicting a Twitter policy that cites NPR as an example of a state-financed media organization that retains editorial independence.

The move continues Twitter owner Elon Musk's feud with media organizations. He publicly endorsed the new label for NPR, claiming the outlet falls under policy language that defines state-affiliated media "as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content."

The NPR Twitter account is now labeled "US state-affiliated media," similar to how RT and Xinhua are labeled "Russia state-affiliated media" and "China state-affiliated media." That move contradicted Twitter's own policy on labeling government or state-affiliated media accounts, which said:

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On Tuesday, President Joe Biden delivered brief remarks on artificial intelligence risks at the opening of a meeting with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology at the White House. The remarks come in the context of increasing worry about generative AI and its potential threats to society and controversial calls for regulatory oversight of the fast-growing industry.

"AI can help deal with some very difficult challenges like disease and climate change," Biden said, according to a transcript provided by the White House. "But we also have to address the potential risks to our society, to our economy, to our national security."

Last week, a group of AI researchers, pundits, and critics called for a six-month pause in the development of AI systems "more powerful" than OpenAI's GPT-4. GPT-4 is a multimodal AI model that can analyze text and images and generate human-like responses. That letter, which has proven controversial among AI experts, called for potential government action if necessary and "new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI."

We loved the 2018 computer-animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and we weren't alone. The film racked up $375.5 million at the global box office against a $90 million production budget and won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature—the first non-Pixar film to do so since 2011. Now Sony Pictures has dropped a new trailer for the much-anticipated sequel: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

(Spoilers for 2018's Into the Spider-Verse below.)

As we've reported previously, Into the Spider-Verse centered on a new incarnation of everyone's favorite web-slinging superhero: Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a teenage graffiti artist of Black and Puerto Rican descent. When Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man (Chris Pine), was killed by Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) in his own universe, Miles (who was bitten by a radioactive spider, too) took up the Spider-Man mantle. He had to stop Fisk, who started opening portals to parallel universes where Fisk's wife and son are still alive.