Login | May 23, 2025
ChatGPT said a guy killed his children, sparking a GDPR privacy complaint
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: May 9, 2025
Nice to see ChatGPT hallucinating its way across Europe.
ChatGPT in Europe comes with a teeny, tiny disclaimer stating that it can sometimes be wrong.
That may not be good enough if the chatbot comes up with a search result that says a Norwegian man killed his children.
Inputting the man’s name into ChatGPT got a return that said that he had three children, and that he murdered two of them and tried to kill the third. It wasn’t true.
Adding to the weirdness was the fact that the chatbot got the names of the father, three sons and home town correctly, but made up an entire murder case around them.
And now the man, through privacy advocates, is filing a privacy complaint against Open AI.
The GDPR says that any data retrieved online has to be accurate.
So this is considered to be a privacy violation.
The GDPR allows the right of a person whose privacy has been violated to correct any incorrect information.
But ChatGPT doesn’t have any way to do that—there’s no way for a user to get inside the chatbot and make that kind of correction.
This isn’t the only time that ChatGPT has made huge mistakes and hallucinated negative information about a person.
In one case, an Australian major was falsely implicated in a bribery scandal, and in another case a German journalist was falsely named as a child abuser.
For its part, OpenAI has stated that the version of its product that hallucinated a Norwegian child murder has been updated and now might be better. And the updated version didn’t return that particular hallucination.
A couple of further searches through ChatGPT of the Norwegian man’s name came back with more hallucinations, but didn’t talk about him killing his kids.
Still, the initial shock that led to the privacy complaint is still working in the background.
The complaint was filed with the Norwegian GDPR office, but another ChatGPT privacy complaint has apparently been languishing in the Irish office.
So we’ll see if this gets anywhere.
But you can try it yourself—put your name into ChatGPT and see what happens.