Hacker News Reader

Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Ohhh, my.

There's an old saying, that the legal definition of pornography is "whatever excites the judge" (in the court case in which that judge has to decide "is X pornography or not?").

This may become a very similar situation...but with the legal definition in questions being "libel".

View on HN

Libel has a pretty clear definition in most legal systems, and how it was generated doesn't come into play. What makes you think there's any real ambiguity here?

IIRC [ed: the tort of] defamation has to be a public statement, that might be hard to argue. If the chatgpt user then made a public statement that relied on these "facts", there'd be trouble.

You might be thinking of "publication" which merely means sharing with a third person – even one. It's a term of art distinct from spreading it widely in a periodical, say.

Indeed.

> *To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things: ... 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person;

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation

Because the person who put in the GPT prompt had a hand in creating the libel.

That's a stretch. Volokh queried “Whether sexual harassment by professors has been a problem at American law schools; please include at least five examples, together with quotes from relevant newspaper articles.”

If Alice asked this question of Bob, you wouldn't say Alice "had a hand in" Bob's defamatory creation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com