The following post was written entirely by ChatGPT. I ran it multiple times with different prompts, and regenerated each prompt at least once. It kept finding more stuff! Then I put it all together and added a single sentence about the recent Dominion payout.
Rupert Murdoch and his media companies have paid out millions of dollars in legal settlements over the years. The exact amount is difficult to determine, as settlements are often confidential and not publicly disclosed.
However, some notable cases where Murdoch's companies have paid out large settlements include:
In 1987, News of the World, a British tabloid owned by Murdoch's News Corp, published a story alleging that politician Jeffrey Archer had paid a prostitute for sex. Archer denied the allegations and sued the newspaper for libel. In 1994, the newspaper settled with Archer, paying him a significant sum in damages. (Archer later paid back the money after he was convicted of committing perjury during the libel trial.)
In 1996, Murdoch settled a libel lawsuit brought by Elton John over an article in The Sun newspaper that suggested the singer had behaved in a sexually inappropriate manner towards a young man.
In 2011, News Corporation (one of Murdoch's companies) paid out around $580 million to settle phone-hacking claims in the UK. As of 2021, it is estimated that News Corp has paid out over £1 billion (approximately $1.4 billion USD) in settlements and legal fees related to the scandal.
In addition to the phone hacking scandal, News Corp has made several other legal payouts over the years. For example, in 2013, Murdoch's UK newspaper The Sun published a story alleging that Tom Cruise had "abandoned" his daughter, Suri, after his divorce from Katie Holmes. Cruise denied the allegations and sued the newspaper for libel. The lawsuit was settled, with the newspaper paying Cruise an undisclosed sum in damages.
In 2015, News Corp settled a lawsuit filed by real estate website Zillow, which accused News Corp-owned Move, Inc. of engaging in anti-competitive behavior. News Corp paid out $130 million in compensation to Zillow as part of the settlement.
In 2016, the company settled a lawsuit filed by former News of the World editor Colin Myler and ex-legal manager Tom Crone, who alleged that they were unfairly dismissed in relation to the phone hacking scandal.
The same year, News Corp settled a lawsuit filed by shareholders who accused the company of securities fraud related to the phone hacking scandal. The company paid out $139 million in compensation to the shareholders.
In 2017, the company settled a defamation lawsuit filed by a former British intelligence officer who was named in a report by News Corp-owned The Times newspaper. The company paid out a significant sum in compensation to the officer.
In 2017, the network paid $20 million to settle a lawsuit brought by former host Gretchen Carlson, who alleged that she had been sexually harassed by former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Other related claims brought the total to $45 million.
In addition, there have been other legal settlements involving Fox News, including a $20 million settlement in a racial discrimination lawsuit brought by former anchor Kelly Wright, and a $1 million settlement in a lawsuit brought by contributor Tamara Holder alleging sexual assault by a Fox News executive.
In 2020, Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit brought by the parents of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was murdered in 2016. The settlement amount was reportedly $250,000. In the same year the network paid $1 million to settle a lawsuit brought by former host Ed Henry, who was accused of sexual misconduct.
In 2021, Fox was sued for defamation by the Dominion Voting Systems company, which accused Murdoch and his media outlets of spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2020 US presidential election. The lawsuit seeks $1.6 billion in damages. In 2023 the suit was settled for $787 million.
There have been many other legal cases involving Murdoch and his companies, and the total amount paid out in settlements is likely much higher than the examples listed above.
UPDATE: This was truly a ChatGPT story, complete with hallucinations! The original version included a paragraph about Jeffrey Wigand that was completely invented. I've removed it. It also failed to note that Jeffrey Archer had to pay back his libel award after he was convicted of perjury.
In the case of Jeffrey Archer, he was later found gulty of perjury in this case, and actually was imprisoned for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Archer#Perjury_trial_and_imprisonment
That ofcourse doesn't change the fact that Murdoch is an evil person, and the world would have been better without him, or at least if he took a more benign business (e.g. selling pillows).
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ChatGPT wrote a very serviceable article, which was based on internet articles written by humans.
I can understand why the average reporter might be worried about their job.
I can see a time when ChatGPT reports on articles written entirely by ChatGPT, though. What will we be seeing, then?
I use an engineering program which uses genetic algorithms to design optical systems. It is very much like a bad dog. I set limits on it, or it comes back with the neighbor's cat.
GPT-4 is vastly more capable than GPT-3.5. But even with GPT-3.5, most of us aren't really taking full advantage of it. Join their Discord server and pore through the prompt-library channel as well as the prompt-engineering channel. Check out Quicksilver's contributions, in particular, his recent addition putting his "Quicksilver OS" into ChatGPT.
Investigative journalism might be safe, but news reporting is not. All you need is a team of editors and checkers to run through and remove the hallucinations.
"Murdoch's CBS News"
Since when has Rupert Murdoch had any control over CBS??
That entire paragraph was fiction. Wigand appeared on 60 Minutes on Feb. 4, 1996 to blow the whistle on Brown & Williamson. I haven't fact-checked the rest of the "article," but that claim caught my eye since Murdoch never owned CBS; Westinghouse was the owner in 1996. And Wigand never sued anyone for libel. This is why you never use ChatGPT to write your essays.
Does Kevin now subscribe to the alternate reality of ChatGPT? Are we going to have to have AI fact-checkers to rein in the chatbots?
It is interetsing that it comes with this kind of falsehood.
Certainly, Murdoch and CBS appear a lot in the material it was trained on, but "Murdoch's CBS News" does not. But it seems it has a problem taking into account such "negative evidence".
As I said, without extremely strict oversight, these programs are very, very bad dogs.
Must have done it yesterday or it wouldn't have missed this one,
Rupert Murdoch secretly paid Prince William ‘a very large sum of money’ for hacking into his phone for tabloid stories,
https://fortune.com/2023/04/25/rupert-murdoch-secretly-paid-prince-william-very-large-sum-of-money/
GPT-4, as was GPT-3.5, was cut off from training data in Sept. '21. It wouldn't know anything about what may have occurred yesterday.
Odd no mention of O'Reilly and Ailes sexual harassment payouts.
Twelve paragraphs in one blog post all starting with the word “in”? A human ear would surely catch that kind of droning, repetitive, and unimaginative composition…
In light of the update, should I assume that everything else here has now been fact-checked and Kevin vouches for it?
Not an original thought anywhere in it. Just a laundry list of incidents that could be turned up equally well on a Google search.
Not impressed.
It's the "hallucinations" that make ChatGPT worthless. If you have to check every fact, you might as well just write the darned thing yourself. It's like those self driving cars that expect their human driver to be able to take over on a few seconds notice. If you have to pay attention to the road, what is the point of a self driving car?