• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, May 5, 2024

Among the jokes at the White House correspondents’ dinner last week was one that AI is going to take reporters’ jobs.  

Funny or not, it’s a legitimate worry. From Engadget comes word that X, the former Twitter, is using Grok AI to curate “Stories On X,” an offering that includes news and other types of content.  

As X acknowledges, “Grok can make mistakes.” For instance, an AI-generated story said NBA player Klay Thompson had gone on a “vandalism spree,” not understanding that the phrase “throwing bricks” had a certain meaning in a basketball game, Engadget writes.  

This type of gaffe has popped up in several attempts to use AI to create stories. Responsible news organizations simply do not allow the practice.  

You can say what you about X. But AI figured in at least a couple of other big news stories last week in ways that could impact publishing. One is about the complaint filed with the Austrian data regulator against OpenAI by the European privacy group None Of Your Business (Noyb). 

The group charges that OpenAI is violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that data on individuals be accurate, and that it can be accessed and corrected. 

The complaint alleges that OpenAI (referred to here as “the controller”) provided inaccurate information on a data subject’s birth, based on inference.  

The data subject, who is a public figure, filed an access and erasure request, but the company stated there is “no way to prevent its systems from displaying the data subject’s inaccurate date of birth in the output, if the user asks for this piece of information,” the complaint alleges. 

“ChatGPT cannot correct information, cannot selectively block information and any data subject must simply live with that situation – according to the controller,” it continues. “ChatGPT seems to take the view that it can simply spread false information and is (other than any media company or other controller) not liable for it.” 

Finally, Alden Global Capital sued OpenAI and Microsoft under similar grounds as The New York Times accused the defendants of “purloining millions of the Publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment to fuel the commercialization of their generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) products, including ChatGPT and Copilot.”

It is not clear if Alden and the Times are pursuing these actions until they get a decent offer from OpenAI. But they look like serious enough pieces of litigation.