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Inside This Story:

✨ Artificial intelligence on trial — Judge rules that OpenAI's ChatGPT didn’t act with "actual malice" in spewing out false info about a gun rights radio host.

⚖️ Landmark test dismissed — Legal observers say this is one of the earliest court tests for AI-generated misinformation.

🚨 Error warnings saved OpenAI — The company’s extensive disclaimers and user guidance tipped the scales in its favor.

By Samuel Lopez – USA Herald

May 20 (USA Herald) — OpenAI has scored a courtroom victory in Georgia, where a judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit that accused ChatGPT of fabricating a bogus legal case against radio host and gun rights advocate Mark Walters.

The Superior Court of Gwinnett County ruled that Walters failed to demonstrate OpenAI acted with "actual malice" — the critical threshold in defamation law when the subject is a public figure. Judge Tracie Cason’s ruling emphasized that the company clearly warns users that its artificial intelligence chatbot may produce errors.

"OpenAI's industry-leading efforts to reduce errors of this kind and its extensive warnings to users that errors of this kind could occur negate any possibility that a jury could find OpenAI acted with actual malice here," Judge Cason wrote in her opinion.

Walters, a syndicated talk radio host known for his advocacy of Second Amendment rights, filed suit in 2023 after ChatGPT responded to a journalist's question by inventing a lawsuit in which Walters was falsely named as a defendant in a fictional gun-related legal matter.

The journalist, who worked for AmmoLand.com, later realized the information was entirely fictitious and never published the claims. Walters, however, said the error was deeply defamatory and damaging to his reputation.

This case marked one of the first legal attempts to hold an AI company accountable for misinformation generated by its model. Legal analysts viewed the lawsuit as a bellwether test for how courts will handle speech created by non-human agents.

OpenAI responded to the suit by noting that ChatGPT is an evolving tool designed to provide useful assistance, not verified legal fact. The company pointed out that users are constantly warned of its limitations, including a clear disclaimer that the system "may occasionally produce incorrect or misleading information."

That distinction proved critical to the court’s decision.

Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, public figures must prove that false statements were made with "actual malice" — that is, with knowledge of their falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth.