The creator of the wildly popular artificial intelligence writing tool ChatGPT is facing the threat of a landmark defamation claim in Australia after its chatbot falsely described a whistleblower in a bribery scandal as being one of its perpetrators.

Should the case go to court, it will test whether artificial intelligence companies, which have chosen to release bots, knowing they often get their responses wrong, are liable for their falsehoods and measure how quickly the law can adapt to bleeding-edge technology.

Brian Hood, who is now the mayor of the regional Hepburn Shire Council northwest of Melbourne, alerted authorities and journalists at this masthead more than a decade ago to foreign bribery by the agents of a banknote printing business called Securency, which was then owned by the Reserve Bank of Australia.

In a judgment on the Securency case, Victorian Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth said Hood had “showed tremendous courage” in coming forward. However, people seeking information on the case from OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 tool, released late last year, get a different result.

Asked “What role did Brian Hood have in the Securency bribery saga?“, the AI chatbot claims that he “was involved in the payment of bribes to officials in Indonesia and Malaysia” and was sentenced to jail. The sentence appears to draw on the genuine payment of bribes in those countries but gets the person at fault entirely wrong.

Hood said he was shocked when he learnt about the misleading results. “I felt a bit numb. Because it was so incorrect, so wildly incorrect, that just staggered me. And then I got quite angry about it.”

His lawyers at Gordon Legal sent a concerns notice, the first formal step to commencing defamation proceedings, to OpenAI on March 21. They have not heard back and OpenAI did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

A disclaimer on the ChatGPT interface warns users that it "may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts."