Microsoft Co-Pilot Falsely Accuses Court Reporter of Crimes He Covered

An anonymous reader shares a report: Language models generate text based on statistical probabilities. This led to serious false accusations against a veteran court reporter by Microsoft’s Copilot. German journalist Martin Bernklau typed his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his culture blog posts would be picked up by the chatbot, according to German public broadcaster SWR. The responses shocked Bernklau. Copilot falsely claimed that Bernklau had been charged and convicted of child abuse and exploitation of dependents. It also claimed that he had been involved in a dramatic escape from a psychiatric hospital and had exploited grieving women as an unethical undertaker. Copilot even went so far as to claim that it was “unfortunate” that someone with such a criminal past had a family and, according to SWR, provided Bernklau’s full address along with his phone number and route planner. I asked Copilot today who Martin Bernklau of Germany was, and the system responded, based on SWR’s report, that he “was involved in a controversy where an AI chat system falsely labeled him a convicted pedophile, a mental institution escapee, and a fraudster.” Perplexity.ai wrote a similar response based on the SWR article, explicitly naming Microsoft Copilot as the AI ​​system.

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