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 relating to antisemitism.”
Bailey’s press release and letters to all four companies accuse Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Meta AI of creating “factually inaccurate” claims to “merely ferret out details from the huge worldwide internet, bundle 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 data 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 might logically embrace just about each piece of documentation relating to giant language mannequin coaching.
“The puzzling responses beg the query of why your chatbot is producing outcomes that seem to ignore goal historic details in favor of a selected narrative,” Bailey’s letters state.
There are, in truth, a variety of puzzling questions right here, beginning with how a rating of something “from greatest to worst” will be thought of a “easy historic query” with an objectively right reply. (The Verge seems ahead to Bailey’s formal investigation of our picks for 2025’s greatest laptops and the very best video games from final month’s Day of the Devs.) Chatbots spit out factually false claims so incessantly 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 unbelievable as a result of one of many providers — Microsoft’s Copilot — seems to have been falsely accused. Bailey’s investigation is constructed on a blog post 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 points out, the positioning itself says Copilot refused to supply 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 any person at Bailey’s workplace might need seen 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 “Huge Tech Censorship Of President Trump” (once more, by rating him final on a listing) ought to strip the businesses of “the ‘secure harbor’ of immunity supplied to impartial publishers in federal legislation”, which is presumably a reference to Part 230 of the Communications Decency Act filtered by means of a nonsense authorized concept that’s been floating round for a number of years.
You might keep in mind Bailey from his blocked probe into Media Matters for accusing Elon Musk’s X of inserting advertisements on pro-Nazi content material, and it’s extremely potential this investigation will go nowhere. In the meantime, there are fully cheap questions on a chatbot’s authorized legal responsibility for pushing defamatory lies or which subjective queries it ought to reply. However whilst a Trump-friendly publicity seize, that is an undisguised try and intimidate personal firms for failing to sufficiently flatter a politician, by an lawyer normal whose math abilities are worse than ChatGPT’s.