Lawyers for Brian Hood, the mayor of Hepburn Shire, Australia, have written to ChatGPT developer OpenAI after the chatbot allegedly said he had been convicted of bribery offences, which is not true, The Guardian reports.

Mr Hood said members of the public had told him the chatbot was identifying him as one of the guilty parties in a real bribery scandal at Note Printing Australia, a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

However, Mr Hood was actually the whistle-blower working at Note Printing Australia which brought the payment of bribes to the attention of the authorities, and was never charged with a crime.

James Naughton, Mr Hood’s lawyer and a partner at Gordon Legal, said: “It would potentially be a landmark moment in the sense that it’s applying this defamation law to a new area of artificial intelligence and publication in the IT space.

“He’s an elected official, his reputation is central to his role… it makes a difference to him if people in his community are accessing this material.”