In April of last year, there was a lot of uproar over an AI-generated interview with Michael Schumacher. The author was a German magazine, Die Aktuelle, which falsely presented a dialogue with the seven-time Formula 1 world champion as genuine.
“The First Interview” was the front-page headline of the magazine. The interview, published without specifying that it was fake, was created using a chatbot platform called Character.ai (which functions similarly to well-known ChatGPT).
Using this application, Die Aktuelle asked the former German driver various questions, including one about his health status following the skiing accident in Méribel, France, on December 29, 2013 (“How are you today?”). The responses were highly disturbing, ranging from “my life has completely changed since the accident” to “it has been a horrible time for the whole family.” Additionally, there were disturbing details like “I was so severely injured that I remained in a sort of artificial coma for months.”
Two days after the article’s publication, editor-in-chief Anne Hoffmann, who had conceived the AI interview with Michael Schumacher, was fired. The Funke Mediengruppe, the publisher of Die Aktuelle, apologized to the Schumacher family for the incident.
However, Corinna, Michael’s wife, could not accept the apology. Consequently, she and the entire family of the multiple F1 world champion initiated legal action against the magazine.
Just over a year later, the lawsuit has been won. The Landesarbeitsgericht, the Munich Labor Court, has ordered Funke Mediengruppe to compensate the Schumacher family with 200,000 euros.
Source: f1ingenerale
Leave a Reply