Under-fire AI chatbot tech ChatGPT could be facing a first-of-its-kind defamation lawsuit in Australia.

Brian Hood, the mayor of Hepburn Shire northwest of Melbourne who was elected last November, said that he may sue the makers of ChatGPT, OpenAI, after members of the public told him that the chatbot had falsely named him as a guilty party in an historic foreign bribery scandal.

Two companies linked to the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) were fined over $16 million in 2011 and 2012 after pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy to bribe foreign officials between December 1999 to September 2004.

Hood did work for one of the firms – Note Printing Australia – but his lawyers have said that he was the person who notified authorities about payment of bribes to foreign officials to win printing contracts.

Lawyers representing the mayor said they sent a letter of concern to OpenAI on 21 March, giving the company 28 days to fix the errors or face a possible defamation suit.

OpenAI, which counts Microsoft as one of its chief backers, is yet to publicly respond to the letter and allegations.

The chatbot maker has faced multiple lawsuits over its use of Open Source code, but this would likely be the first time a person has sued OpenAI for claims made by ChatGPT. Should Hood deliver on his threat, it would be one of the most high-profile tech lawsuits in modern history and establish important precedents over responsibility and culpability for claims made by chatbots trained with AI.

Elsewhere, it has been reported that Germany could follow Italy in banning ChatGPT due to privacy concerns with the country’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Ulrich Kelber telling Handelsblatt that “such action is also possible”.

Italy's temporary ban on the chatbot has attracted the interest of EU lawmakers to consider whether the data used by ChatGPT's algorithms are in violation of regulations such as GDPR.

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