Can ChatGPT be held legally responsible?

As school drags on, so do the lectures. This week was special, though, because I had another speaker outside all the usual ones. My media law professor required our class to go to a guest lecture by a Cornell professor who teaches law and has a degree in computer science. His talk was titled “The Defamation Machine: Can Chat GPT Commit Libel?” Or, in other words, can Chat GPT be held legally responsible for statements it fabricates? I honestly found it interesting, so I’ll share some of the things I remember. 

In case you don’t know, Chat GPT is an online application that will write for you.  You can tell it to create an essay on any topic you identify; you can have it craft a poem or–apparently–a statement to be used in court.

In his 45-minute lecture, the professor, (whose name is James Grimmelmann, so I guess I could call him that) talked about one legal proceeding during which someone speaking in court used Chat GPT to summarize some circumstances of the case . It seems the text created by the app made a wrongful accusation, and so the plaintiff filed a lawsuit against it. I don’t remember if he won or not. 

But then James got into the question of why we expect Chat GPT to be correct. That stuck with me. Why do we expect AI to be correct all of the time? Chat GPT gets all of its information from things already on the internet, and we all know that the internet isn’t completely factual. So then theoretically, how can Chat GPT be correct all the time? In my opinion, it can’t. I don’t like to use it anyway, although I know that students love to use it to help them with homework and writing essays and such. 

James went on to say a whole lot more, half of which I listened to. (I don’t know how people attend night classes successfully. I’d either be tired or angry because I’m hungry.) 

In completely other news, it was quite an interesting time watching the Gophers narrowly win against Iowa in football on Saturday. To be honest, we didn’t deserve it, but now at least we have the pig, which I never knew about. I guess like the ax game with Wisconsin, there’s this metal pig that goes back and forth between Iowa and Minnesota depending on who wins each year’s designated game. We haven’t had the pig since 2015, so it’s been a long while. 

While the Gopher men’s hockey sadly lost their second game to North Dakota last Saturday, they will be playing Wisconsin on Thursday and Friday, and I’m lucky enough to get to be there. I’ll be in the band, but at least it means I get in free. I love watching games against Wisconsin because it’s just a reason to hate on a school for theoretically no reason other than being rivals. Also, we tend to win against Wisconsin, so that’s always nice. Although don’t ask my roommates, who are die-hard Packer fans and don’t hesitate to make fun of the Vikings whenever they get the chance. 

Halloween is this coming weekend, and I can tell campus is getting ready. Correction, the students are getting ready. The number of Halloween parties that will be going on either in the fraternity houses or in peoples’ homes and apartments is probably intense. Personally, I will be home this weekend to work at the bar, so I get to skip out on most of the crazy stuff. Lucky me. 

My Determination: "I understand nothing." - Michael Scott, The Office