Arve Hjalmar Holmen, a resident of Norway, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI after their artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, fabricated a false story accusing him of murdering his children.
Holmen asked the bot for information about himself, and in response, ChatGPT generated a story in which he supposedly killed his two sons, aged 7 and 10, and was planning to kill a third child. The AI-generated story claimed that the children’s bodies were found in a pond near their home in Trondheim in December 2020, and that Holmen was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
In response to the shocking information, Holmen contacted the Norwegian Data Protection Authority and demanded that OpenAI be fined. Experts explain the incident as an example of AI “hallucinations,” where algorithms generate false data due to a lack of information or faulty assumptions.
Following the incident, OpenAI updated the ChatGPT model to now cross-reference current news articles. However, specialists warn that one cannot be entirely sure that data has been fully cleared unless the model is completely retrained.
