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And the NYT knows that its articles frequently contain false statements too. In this case they were sued for it and won even though they admitted in court that the libelous statements were not true. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/business/media/new-york-t.... The actual malice standard is next to impossible to meet.

One could argue that the LLM are not making any statements at all, as that would require intent and purpose beyond what they can (currently) do. The LLM outputs the most likely token to appear next, based on what it learned during training. This could be anything, and it happens to generate some text that sometimes looks like statements, but is just text generated by lots of math.

Of course I'm not actually arguing this, and have no horses in this race. But not hard to imagine that someone could make this argument and also believe it.

Telling a lie is not illegal by itself. Telling a lie with the intent of harming someone, especially their reputation, is another story.