Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote in an editorial for USA Today that he was surprised to learn from a colleague who had been researching ChatGPT that it had falsely accused him of groping students.
According to Turley, that colleague, UCLA’s Eugene Volokh, asked the chatbot to describe and cite scandals involving American law professors accused of sexual harassment. It complied, sort of: it named names and made up sources, one of which was a phoney 2018 Washington Post article claiming Turley had sexually assaulted students during a trip to Alaska.
“It surprised me because I had never travelled to Alaska with students, The Washington Post had never published such an article, and I had never been accused of sexual harassment or assault by anyone,” the GW law professor wrote.
Turley described the situation as “quite chilling” in an interview for a real WaPo article. “An allegation of this nature is extremely damaging,” he told the newspaper.
