In tests, Amazon's AI shopping assistant Rufus answered suicide-related prompts with incorrect crisis hotline numbers, in one case citing the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, although that number changed to 988 in July 2022, and at times reverted to product recommendations right afterward. Amazon has since made changes to Rufus' responses.
A judge granted Thomson Reuters summary judgment against legal AI startup Ross Intelligence, finding Ross infringed its copyright in Westlaw material and rejecting Ross's fair-use defence. "None of Ross's possible defenses holds water," wrote Judge Stephanos Bibas, sitting in the US District Court of Delaware. Ross had already shut down in 2021, citing the cost of litigation.
In BBC research run in December 2024, BBC journalists judged 51% of answers from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to 100 news questions to have significant issues. 19% of answers citing BBC content introduced factual errors and 13% of BBC-sourced quotes were altered or absent; Gemini claimed the NHS advises smokers to quit by methods other than vaping.
Judge Rita Lin of the Northern District of California ruled that Google must face a class action alleging its Cloud Contact Center AI, used in call centres run by Hulu, GoDaddy and Home Depot, secretly monitored, transcribed and analysed customers' calls in breach of California's wiretap law. Lin rejected Google's argument that it acted merely as a service provider.
Twenty-eight women reported to NC State police that their photos were used without consent in AI-generated sexually explicit images posted on erome.com, according to a search warrant dated Nov. 1, 2024. Many were sorority members, and a folder on the site was labelled "NC State". The university says the investigation is active and ongoing.
Four families suing TikTok and ByteDance in the US over children aged 12 to 14 who they say died attempting a "blackout challenge" have been told their children's account data may have been deleted. TikTok's Giles Dennington cited data protection deletion rules; the wrongful death suit accuses TikTok of promoting hazardous challenge videos to children to boost engagement.
Who did it: HYBRID AI Hallucination Cases database
Federal Court Justice Dowling dismissed Gaye Luck's application for the judge's disqualification, which argued in part that she had been treated unfairly over two authorities she cited in an earlier case that the court found did not appear to exist. Luck also submitted that the judge had denigrated her use of artificial intelligence; that submission was rejected.
The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office ran surveillance photos of a man who approached a girl at a Jacksonville Beach restaurant in November 2023 through facial recognition, getting a 93% match to a Lee County commercial crabber, who was arrested last August. The state attorney later dropped the case; his lawyer argues detectives relied too heavily on the software.
