When German journalist Martin Bernklau typed his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his articles would be picked up by the chatbot, the answers horrified him.
Copilot’s results had asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser and a conman preying on widowers. For years, Bernklau had served as a court reporter and the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot had falsely blamed him for the crimes he had covered.
The accusations against Bernklau are not true, of course, and are examples of generative AI “hallucinations”. These are inaccurate or nonsensical responses to a prompt provided by the user and are alarmingly common with this technology. Anyone attempting to use AI should always proceed with great caution, because information from such systems needs validation and verification by humans before it can be trusted.
