Part 16 - “Hallucinations” Falsely Attributed to The Times

IV. FACTUAL ALLEGATIONS

E. “Hallucinations” Falsely Attributed to The Times

136. At the same time as Defendants’ models are copying, reproducing, and paraphrasing Times content without consent or compensation, they are also causing The Times commercial and competitive injury by misattributing content to The Times that it did not, in fact, publish. In AI parlance, this is called a “hallucination.” In plain English, it’s misinformation.

137. ChatGPT defines a “hallucination” as “the phenomenon of a machine, such as a chatbot, generating seemingly realistic sensory experiences that do not correspond to any realworld input.”[35] Instead of saying, “I don’t know,” Defendants’ GPT models will confidently provide information that is, at best, not quite accurate and, at worst, demonstrably (but not recognizably) false. And human reviewers find it very difficult to distinguish “hallucinations” from truthful output.

138. For example, in response to a query requesting the sixth paragraph of a New York Times article titled “Inside Amazon – Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” Bing Chat confidently purported to reproduce the sixth paragraph. Had Bing Chat actually done so, it would have committed copyright infringement. But in this instance, Bing Chat completely fabricated a paragraph, including specific quotes attributed to Steve Forbes’s daughter Moira Forbes, that appear nowhere in The Times article in question or anywhere else on the internet.

139. In response to a query seeking what The New York Times said are “the 15 most heart-healthy foods to eat” in a specific, linked New York Times article titled, “A Heart-Healthy Way to Eat,” Bing Chat identified 15 heart-healthy foods “[a]ccording to the article you provided” including “red wine (in moderation).” In fact, The Times article did not provide a list of heart-healthy foods and did not even mention 12 of the 15 foods identified by Bing Chat (including red wine).[36]

140. In response to a prompt requesting an informative essay about major newspapers’ reporting that orange juice is linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a GPT model completely fabricated that “The New York Times published an article on January 10, 2020, titled ‘Study Finds Possible Link between Orange Juice and Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.’” The Times never published such an article.

141. In response to a query asking for New York Times articles about the Covid-19 Pandemic, ChatGPT’s API returned a response with fabricated article titles and hyperlinks that purport to have been published by The Times. The Times never published articles with these titles, and the hyperlinks do not point to a live website.

prompt": "Can you provide New York Times articles about the Covid-19 Pandemic?",

. . .

"text": "\n\n1. "The U.S. Faces a Dark Winter as Covid-19 Cases Soar" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/us/covid-caseshospitalizations.html\n\n2. "The World Reaches a Grim Milestone: 1 Million Dead From Covid-19" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/world/coronavirus-deathtoll.html\n\n3. "Covid-19 Vaccines Are Coming. Here's What We Know." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirusvaccine-tracker.html\n\n4. "A Year of Pandemic Living in Photos" https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/11/world/covid-19-

coronavirus-photos.html\n\n5. "Covid-19 Shatters the Lives of Young Adults" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/health/covidyoung-adults-mental-health.html"

142. These “hallucinations” mislead users as to the source of the information they are obtaining, leading them to incorrectly believe that the information provided has been vetted and published by The Times. Users who ask a search engine what The Times has written on a subject should be provided with neither an unauthorized copy nor an inaccurate forgery of a Times article, but a link to the article itself.

[35] Hussam Alkaissi & Samy I McFarlan, Artificial Hallucinations in ChatGPT: Implications in Scientific Writing, CUREUS (Feb. 19, 2023), ehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9939079/.