The law needs to stand up and make an example here, otherwise this will just continue and at some point a real disaster will occur due to AI.
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Being wrong is usually not a punishable offence. It could be considered defamation, but defamation is usually required to be intentional, and it is clearly not the case here. And I think most AIs have disclaimers saying that that may be wrong, and hallucinations are pretty common knowledge at this point.
What could be asked is for the person in question to be able to make a correction, it is actually a legal requirement in France, probably elsewhere too, but from the article, it looks like Gemini already picked up the story and corrected itself.
If hallucinations were made illegal, you might as well make LLMs illegal, which may be seen as a good thing, but it is not going to happen. Maybe legislators could mandate an official way to report wrongful information about oneself and filter these out, as I think it is already the case for search engines. I think it is technically feasible.
Is it? Or can it be just reckless, without any regard for the truth?
Can I create a slander AI that simply makes up stories about random individuals and publicizes them, not because I'm trying to hurt people (I don't know them), but because I think it's funny and I don't care about people?
Is the only thing that determines my guilt or innocence when I hurt someone my private, unverifiable mental state? If so, doesn't that give carte blanche to selective enforcement?
I know for a fact this is true in some places, especially the UK (at least since the last time I checked), where the truth is not a defense. If you intend to hurt a quack doctor in the UK by publicizing the evidence that he is a quack doctor, you can be convicted for consciously intending to destroy his fraudulent career, and owe him compensation.
In French law, truth is not required for a statement to be defamatory, but intent is. Intent is usually obvious, for example, if I am saying a restaurant owner poisons his clients, there is no way I am not intentionally hurting his business, it is defamation.
However, if I say that Benn Jordan supports Israel's occupation of Gaza in a neutral tone, like Gemini does here, then it shows no intention to hurt. It may even be seen positively, I mean, for a Palestine supporter to go to Israel to understand the conflict from the opponent side shows an open mind and it is something I respect. Benn Jordan sees it as defamatory because it grossly misrepresent his opinion, but from an outside perspective, is is way less clear, especially if the author of the article has no motive to do harm.
If instead the article had been something along the lines of "Benn Jordan showed support for the genocide in Gaza by visiting Israel", then intent becomes clear again.
As for truth, it is a defense and it is probably the case in the UK too. The word "defense" is really important here, because the burden of proof is reversed. The accused has to prove that everything written is true, and you really have to be prepared to pull that off. In addition, you can't use anything private.
So yeah, you can be convicted for hurting a quack doctor using factual evidence, if you are not careful. You should probably talk to a lawyer before writing such an article.