Last month, a Georgia state court granted OpenAI’s motion for summary judgment, dismissing a defamation suit brought by a nationally syndicated radio show host.
In the suit, Mark Walters v. OpenAI LLC, 23-A-04860-2 (Sup. Ct. Gwinnett Cty, GA), the plaintiff alleged that that the ChatGPT tool, developed by OpenAI, defamed him when it presented false information about him to a journalist. According court’s order, the journalist used the AI tool to summarize a complaint while writing an article about an unrelated lawsuit. The summary provided by ChatGPT falsely stated that the complaint was filed against the plaintiff for committing fraud and embezzlement.
In granting summary judgment, the court, first, found that “a reasonable reader in [the journalist]’s position could not have concluded that the challenged ChatGPT output communicated ‘actual facts,’” and thus the output is not defamatory as a matter of law. Among other things, the court observed that “ChatGPT warned [the journalist] that it could not access the internet or access the link to the . . . complaint that [he] provided to it, and that it did not have information about the period of time in which the complaint was filed, which was after its ‘knowledge cutoff date.’” The court cited expert testimony which found that the journalist’s “Prompt Engineering techniques and choice to ignore ChatGPT’s warnings about its limitations contributed to the non-factual output.”
Second, the court found that the plaintiff could not demonstrate fault under a negligence or actual malice standard. The court explained that whereas OpenAI offered evidence “demonstrating [it] leads the Al industry in attempting to reduce and avoid mistaken output like the challenged output here,” the plaintiff “identified no evidence of what procedures a reasonable publisher in OpenAl’s position would have employed based on the skill and experience normally exercised by members of its profession.” The court also found the plaintiff is a public figure, and thus must establish that OpenAI acted with actual malice to hold the company liable for defamation, but that plaintiff did not provide any evidence to support that contention.