ChatGPT wrongly claims Alexander Hanff is dead
Occurred: March 2023
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OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot accused privacy advocate Alexander Hanff of being dead, raising concerns about the system's accuracy and tendency to 'hallucinate' information it generates.
Per The Register, Hanff had asked ChatGPT who he is. The final paragragh of its reponse stating that he had 'passed away in 2019 at the age of 48.' It went to say that Hanff's death had 'been publicly reported in several news sources, including in his obituary on the website of The Guardian' and linked to a false article on the Guardian website.
Hanff issued a cease and desist letter demanding OpenAI remove his personal data from their GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 datasets.
System 🤖
Operator: Alexander Hanff
Developer: OpenAI
Country: Sweden
Sector: Business/professional services
Purpose: Generate text
Technology: Chatbot; NLP/text analysis; Neural network; Deep learning; Machine learning; Reinforcement learning
Issue: Accuracy/reliability; Mis/disinformation
Transparency: Governance; Complaints/appeals
Research, advocacy 🧮
Page info
Type: Incident
Published: November 2023