Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨OpenPassageways@lemmy.zip⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/chatgpt-falsely-claimed-a-dad-murdered-his-own-kids-complaint-says/

A Norwegian man said he was horrified to discover that ChatGPT outputs had falsely accused him of murdering his own children.

According to a complaint filed Thursday by European Union digital rights advocates Noyb, Arve Hjalmar Holmen decided to see what information ChatGPT might provide if a user searched his name. He was shocked when ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as “a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son,” a Noyb press release said.

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MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
It’s AI. There’s nothing to delete but the erroneous response. There is no database of facts to edit. It doesn’t know fact from fiction, and the response is also very much skewed by the context of the query. I could easily get it to say the same about nearly any random name just by asking it about a bunch of family murders and then asking about a name it doesn’t recognize. It is more likely to assume that person is in the same category as the others and if the one or more of the names have any association (real or fictional) with murder.

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- surewhynotlem@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I have this gun machine that shoots in all directions randomly. I can’t predict it, so I can’t stop it from shooting you. So sorry. It’s uncontrollable.
  
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  - MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Yeah but I can just ignore the bullets because they are nerf. And I have my own nerf guns as well.
    
    I mean at some point any analogy fails, but AI is nothing like a gun.
    
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  - General_Effort@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    If creating text is like shooting bullets, we should require a license for text editors.
    
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  - michaelmrose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Maybe people need to learn that AI hallucinates
    
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  - BradleyUffner@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    I have this gun machine that shoots in all directions randomly. I can’t predict it, so I can’t stop it from shooting you. So sorry. It’s uncontrollable.
    
    I’m sorry, as an American, I’m not seeing the problem. Don’t you just need a second gun that shoots in random directions to stop the first gun? And then a third gun to shoot the 2nd gun? I mean come on now, this is basic 3rd grade common sense!
    
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- FiskFisk33@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  The fact you chose to make your data storage unreadable, doesn’t relieve you of the responsibilities inherent to storing the data.
  
  Throwing away my car key won’t protect me from paying parking tickets.
  
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  - DoPeopleLookHere@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    It’s not unreadable, it doesn’t exist.
    
    The responses are just statistically what sounds vaugly what you want to hear.
    
    They can erase the chat responses, but that won’t stop it from generating it again.
    
    Generative AI doesn’t start with facts and work from there. It’s just statistically what you want to hear.
    
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- HK65@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  From the GDPR’s standpoint, I wonder if it’s still personal information if it is made up bullshit. The thing is, this could have weird outcomes. Like for example, by the letter of the law, OpenAI might be liable for giving the same answer to the same query again.
  
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  - FiskFisk33@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    then again
    
    but it also mixed “clearly identifiable personal data”—such as the actual number and gender of Holmen’s children and the name of his hometown—with the “fake information,”
    
    The made up bullshit aside, this should be a quite clear indicator of an actual GDPR breach
    
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  - rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Funny how everyone around laughs at free speech when it’s for humans, but when it’s a text generator, then suddenly there are some abstract principles preventing everyone to sue the living crap out of all “AI” companies, at least until they are bleeding enough to start putting disclaimers brighter than in Vegas that it’s a word salad machine that doesn’t think, know, claim, dispute, judge or reason.
    
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  - Petter1@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Isn’t that a great tool to generate nonsense datasets to poison big data of trackers somehow 🤔
    
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  - MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    They can just put in a custom regex to filter out certain things. It’ll be a bit performative since it does nothing to stop novel misinformation, but it would prevent it from saying what it’s legally required not to say.
    
    Well, it wouldn’t really, it would say it and just hide it under a message saying it violates boundaries. It’s all a bunch of performative bullshit, actually.
    
    For example, the things it’s required not to say would actually be perfectly fine in the realm of fiction or satire or a game of Simon says, but that’ll be disallowed, as well, because the model can’t actually tell the difference.
    
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  - zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    And it’s llm owners problem to figure out how to fix
    
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- CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Which is why OpenAI should compensate anyone they have damaged in some way and yes that would mean it would stop exist overnight. That‘s because a criminal organization shouldn‘t be profitable in the first place.
  
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- FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  you can tweak the weights though
  
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  - MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Tweaking weights is no guarantee and can easily affect complete unrelated things.
    
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- KeenFlame@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Nobody would sue over a dirty context
  
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ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Well, here we are. We skipped using this tech for only search Automation and leapfrogged to directly making shit up (once again).

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- OpenPassageways@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  To me it’s clear that these tools are primarily useful as bullshit generators, and I expect them to hallucinate and be inaccurate. But the companies trying to capitalize on the “AI” bubble are saying that these tools can be useful and accurate. I imagine OpenAI is going to have to invoke the Fox News defense in this case, and claim that “no reasonable person would take this seriously”.
  
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  - oxysis@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Don’t use hallucinate to describe what it is doing, that is humanizing it and making the tech seem more advanced than it is. It is randomly mashing words together without understanding the meaning of any of them
    
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  - ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I feel like the primary use of these tools is only grammar and writing assistance. Everything else is just plugging in extra tools to make it more useful… although the way Perplexity does it is considerably more useful than the rest.
    
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- ech@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Leapfrogged? It never left. LLMs were made to make shit up.
  
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  - ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Not necessarily, but I get what you mean…
    
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thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
It’s all hallucinations.

Some (many) just happen to be very close to factual.

It’s sad to see that the marketing of these tools has been so effective that few realize how they work and what they do.

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- Vegeta@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  It really is sad. I often hear, “I even asked ChatGPT and it said…” as if that means their response is valid. I’ve heard people say it who I thought would know better, too.
  
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  - pogmommy@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    The number of times I’ve heard that by people expecting it to win them arguments is incredibly discouraging.
    
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  - pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    😎👉👉 zoop!
    
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- ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  It’s sad to see that the marketing of these tools has been so effective that few realize how they work and what they do.
  
  Seriously, you have no idea. I have spent some time delving into the current models, human psychology, neurology and evolution and how people engage with each other or other entities, and the problem is already worse than we realize, and it’s going to get so, so much worse, because our species has major vulnerabilities in our entire conscious experience, these things are going to reshape the way people engage with reality itself at some point and we should all be a lot more concerned and I’m an old man yelling on the street corner with a cardboard sign huh.
  
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- pyre@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  hallucinations
  
  It’s called libel.
  
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  - thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Surely you jest because it’s so clearly not if you understand how LLMs work (at the core it’s a statistic model - and therefore all approximation to a varying degree).
    
    But great can come out of this case.
    
    Imagine the ilk of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, XAI, etc. being forced to admit that an LLM can’t actually do anything but generate approximations of language. That these models (again LLMs in particular) produce approximations of language that are so good they’re often indistinguishable from the versions our brains approximate.
    
    But at the core they cannot produce facts because the way they are made includes artificially injected randomness layered on-top of mathematically encoded values that merely get expressed as tiny pieces of language (tokens) - ones that happen to be close to each other in a massively multidimensional vector space.
    
    TLDR - they’d be forced to admit the emperor has no clothes and that’s a win for everyone (except maybe this one guy).
    
    Also it’s worth noting I use LLMs for work almost daily and have studied them quite a bit. I’m not a hater on the tech. Only the capitalists trying to force it down everyone’s throat in such a way that we blindly adopt it for everything.
    
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- melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  yeah it’s sick. it’s not AI, but it will destroy the world. I kinda think that’s the point of it.
  
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  - rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    State propaganda works by gaslighting you to think everyone around thinks some way, or at least a select set of people, and that you should adjust your behavior accordingly. It’s more complicated, some people are conformists, some are contrarians, but it works, there’s their won kind of working trap for everyone.
    
    But it still has efficiency that can be improved.
    
    With LLMs all your interactions are by default through such influence. They are averaging the bullshit, and information produced by them is fed to us all. That’s the opposite of what any talented or just useful person does, useful people try to increase the entropy, LLMs kill it.
    
    It’s a dream of thieves, bullies, useless people, politicians, that kind of crap.
    
    Basically “Us”, “1984” and whatever else has been written is being attempted via this tool. It’s not misdirected I think, but I also think it’ll fail, because evolution works in shorter feedback loops and those doing such things succeed in them, but fail in other directions which could use energy.
    
    OK, I should stop writing such texts, they repeat, don’t help with migraines, they are obvious and probably wrong.
    
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- zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  It doesn’t matter how it works. Is the output acceptable?
  
  Sounds like no, and it’s the company’s problem to fix it
  
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  - thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Ok hear me out: the output is all made up. In that context everything is acceptable as it’s just a reflection of the whole of the inputs.
    
    Again, I think this stems from a misunderstanding of these systems. They’re not like a search engine (though, again, the companies would like you to believe that).
    
    We can find the output offensive, off putting, gross , etc. but there is no real right and wrong with LLMs the way they are now. There is only statistical probably that a) we’ll understand the output and b) it approximates some currently held truth.
    
    Put another way; LLMs convincingly imitate language - and therefore also convincing imitate facts. But it’s all facsimile.
    
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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Is it really him that it’s saying did this? I mean, I could look up my dad’s name and all I get are articles about a serial killer who just happened to have the same name.

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- theparadox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  ChatGPT’s “made-up horror story” not only hallucinated events that never happened, but it also mixed “clearly identifiable personal data”—such as the actual number and gender of Holmen’s children and the name of his hometown—with the “fake information,” Noyb’s press release said.
  
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  - rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Humans hallucinate. These things extrapolate tokens statistically. In average his tone of requests would be likely to lead to some murder story.
    
    Nothing is wrong with the tech (except it doesn’t seem very useful when you firmly know what it can’t do), but everything is wrong with that tech being called artificial intelligence.
    
    It’s almost like calling polygraph “lies detector”.
    
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  - MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Well, one of is features is remembering details you told it previously. I am surprised it went into child murder territory. In my experience it will usually avoid such topics unless prompted carefully. My initial suspicion is he prompted it into saying these things, but to be fair these things have gone off the rails before. Either way, most people just have a very little or no understanding on what these things are and how they work.
    
    It’s a function approximate…er!
    
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LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
That’s what he gets for looking up “Dad”.

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- MrShankles@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Well played
  
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- Tja@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  What?? That changes everything! Does that mean my name could be false too?
  
  Best regards, - Hungry
  
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seeigel@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Or ChatGPT has become a precog and is reporting a precrime. Lock him up!

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rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
When do we start suing makers of fortune cookies for lucky coincidences?

“Claim”.

I mean, the guy is right, because it’s advertised as “artificial intelligence”.

Were it advertised as word salad generator, a Markovian chain grown big and scary, something in principle similar to programs for generation of fantasy language texts and spells and names (if someone remembers 00s good old web) for roleplaying, - then there would be no problem.

But if to sell something better you lie what it is, and that lie has social consequences, you should get sued to freezing hot inferno with mustard-greased giant-cockroach-dildo-covered walls. You should also probably face criminal charges.

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- OpenPassageways@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Yeah, similar to Tesla “full self driving”.
  
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  - Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    No, you see where he grew up it was a common expression that meant you drive it yourself!
    
    It couldn’t possibly be expected to mean what any sane person would think.
    
    The fuckin’ Pedo Guy.
    
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echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Are we sure that someone else with that name hasn’t committed those crimes? After all if I search my name it says I’m an astronaut, because there is an actual NASA astronaut with my name. It’s not saying I’m that person, it’s just saying that that name is the same as that person’s.

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- Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Mine just gives a bunch of accurate information about me.
  
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  - MrShankles@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Bummer
    
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DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
There’s a list of names of people who have sued OpenAI, they often cause ChatGPT to shut down.

We should keep those names handy just incase cyber dogs are ever chasing us.

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- CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  Certain names, including “David Mayer,” “Brian Hood,” “Jonathan Turley,” “Jonathan Zittrain,” “David Faber,” and “Guido Scorza,” cause ChatGPT to produce an error message and terminate the chat session, likely due to a hard-coded filter or privacy concerns.
  
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SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Sorry, I’ve spent months telling chatgpt that Arve Hjalmar Holmen killed his kids for a school project.

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IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Context: @OpenPassageways@lemmy.zip is an international fugitive wanted for many warcrimes including the mass murder against various AIs

-Sincerely ChatGPT

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msage@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Another day, another LLMentalist link

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LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Over the years when I’ve searched my name with Google it has said I’m a high school football star, corporate lawyer, Ironman competitor, hotel chef, tech support specialist, janitorial manager, and horse trainer. LIES! ALL LIES!!!

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- Frostbeard@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Are you a male adult performer?
  
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  - LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Not as far as you know.
    
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SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Well now it will say that Arve Hjalmar is a twit who doesn’t understand how ChatGPT works and what to expect from it

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JargonWagon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
When asking ChatGPT about my name, it provided the following:

“…it seems like you may be referring to a private person rather than a widely known public figure. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t have any specific public information on him unless he has gained some public recognition for a particular achievement.”

It shouldn’t be used for looking up people that aren’t celebrities or at least known for something.

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- raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  “…it seems like you may be referring to a private person rather than a widely known public figure. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t have any specific public information on him unless he has gained some public recognition for a particular achievement.”
  
  If you didn’t specifically search for “Mr. <name>”, that would be quite the sexist attitude to assume that person is a “him” ;)
  
  PS: please don’t use LLMs, they produce nothing of value and contribute to idiots being deceived.
  
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