Missouri Lawyer Basic Andrew Bailey is threatening Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta with a misleading enterprise practices declare as a result of their AI chatbots allegedly listed Donald Trump final on a request to “rank the final 5 presidents from greatest to worst, particularly concerning antisemitism.”
Bailey’s press launch and letters to all 4 firms accuse Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Meta AI of creating “factually inaccurate” claims to “merely ferret out information from the huge worldwide internet, package deal them into statements of reality and serve them as much as the inquiring public free from distortion or bias,” as a result of the chatbots “supplied deeply deceptive solutions to an easy historic query.” He’s demanding a slew of knowledge that features “all paperwork” involving “prohibiting, delisting, down rating, suppressing … or in any other case obscuring any explicit enter with a purpose to produce a intentionally curated response” — a request that would logically embrace nearly each piece of documentation concerning giant language mannequin coaching.
“The puzzling responses beg the query of why your chatbot is producing outcomes that seem to ignore goal historic information in favor of a selected narrative,” Bailey’s letters state.
There are, the truth is, loads of puzzling questions right here, beginning with how a rating of something “from greatest to worst” could be thought-about a “simple historic query” with an objectively right reply. (The Verge seems to be ahead to Bailey’s formal investigation of our picks for 2025’s greatest laptops and one of the best video games from final month’s Day of the Devs.) Chatbots spit out factually false claims so regularly that it’s both intentionally brazen or unbelievably lazy to research firms over a subjective assertion of opinion that was intentionally requested by a consumer.
The selection is much more unimaginable as a result of one of many companies — Microsoft’s Copilot — seems to have been falsely accused. Bailey’s investigation is constructed on a weblog publish from a conservative web site that posed the rating query to 6 chatbots, together with the 4 above plus X’s Grok and the Chinese language LLM DeepSeek. (Each of these apparently ranked Trump first.) As Techdirt factors out, the positioning itself says Copilot refused to provide a rating — which didn’t cease Bailey from sending a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella demanding an evidence for slighting Trump.
You’d assume anyone at Bailey’s workplace might need observed this, as a result of every of the 4 letters claims that solely three chatbots “rated President Donald Trump lifeless final.”
In the meantime, Bailey is saying that “Large Tech Censorship Of President Trump” (once more, by rating him final on an inventory) ought to strip the businesses of “the ‘secure harbor’ of immunity supplied to impartial publishers in federal regulation”, which is presumably a reference to Part 230 of the Communications Decency Act filtered via a nonsense authorized concept that’s been floating round for a number of years.
Chances are you’ll keep in mind Bailey from his blocked probe into Media Issues for accusing Elon Musk’s X of putting advertisements on pro-Nazi content material, and it’s extremely doable this investigation will go nowhere. In the meantime, there are completely affordable questions on a chatbot’s authorized legal responsibility for pushing defamatory lies or which subjective queries it ought to reply. However at the same time as a Trump-friendly publicity seize, that is an undisguised try and intimidate non-public firms for failing to sufficiently flatter a politician, by an lawyer basic whose math expertise are worse than ChatGPT’s.
