When Chatbots Go Rogue: The Dangers Of Poorly Trained AI
ChatGPT and LLM-based chatbots set to improve customer experience
This means specific user inputs can unintentionally or deliberately trigger outputs based on such associations,” says Garraghan. Artificial intelligence chatbots are transforming industries and reshaping interactions — and as their adoption soars, glaring cracks in their design and training are emerging, revealing the potential for major harm from poorly trained AI systems. Deanna Ballew, SVP of product, DXP at digital experience platform maker Acquia, believes that advanced LLMs like ChatGPT will become a dataset and capability of conversational AI, while other technologies will advance ChatGPT to train on. However, businesses must view chatbots and LLMs like GPT not as mere gimmicks but as valuable tools for performing specific tasks.
iOS 26 Beta 4 Released: All the New Features and Changes
Its inability to seamlessly integrate with advanced tools like ChatGPT or handle complex data parsing further restricts its potential for sophisticated applications. Jumping on the success of ChatGPT, OpenAI debuted a paid service called ChatGPT Plus in February 2023. At the time, it appeared to be a simple way for people to jump to the front of the line, which was increasingly long during peak hours. With the release of GPT-4, the premium subscription gave users access to a much more powerful AI chatbot.
Instead, the crowdsourced neocortex account explains why chatbots assert consciousness and related emotional states without genuinely experiencing them. In other words, it provides what philosophers call an “error theory”—an explanation of why we erroneously conclude the chatbots have inner lives. Microsoft’s Tay in 2016 is a prime example of chatbot training gone awry — within 24 hours of its launch, internet trolls manipulated Tay into spouting offensive language. Lars Nyman, CMO of CUDO Compute, calls this phenomenon a “mirror reflecting humanity’s internet id” and warns of the rise of “digital snake oil” if companies neglect rigorous testing and ethical oversight. ChatGPT and other chatbots driven by artificial intelligence can speak in fluent, grammatically sound sentences that may even have a natural rhythm to them. Ordering a full Encyclopedia Britannica set in 2025 sounds like something only a committed Luddite, or someone who refuses to listen to music on anything but vinyl, would do.
What is Grok? Elon Musk’s controversial ChatGPT competitor, explained
They simply don’t know what they don’t know, so instead of refusing to answer, they extrapolate, based on what they do know, and make a guess. A chatbot is, in essence, no more than a machine performing mathematical calculations and statistical analysis to call up the right words and sentences. Bots like ChatGPT are trained on large amounts of text, which allows them to interact with human users in a natural way. To test whether a text has been generated by an LLM, we need to examine not only the content but also the form—the language used. Research shows that ChatGPT tends to favor standard grammar and academic expressions, shunning slang or colloquialisms. But does ChatGPT express ideas differently than other LLM-powered tools when discussing the same topic?
Such combinations are called “trigrams.” By seeing which trigrams are used most often, we can get a sense of someone’s unique way of putting the words together. I extracted the 20 most frequent trigrams for both ChatGPT and Gemini and compared them. It gave a side-by-side comparison of the processes, clearly outlining the number of cell divisions, the genetic outcomes, and the biological roles of each. While the Character.AI case shows the extreme dangers of sycophancy for vulnerable users, sycophancy could reinforce negative behaviors in just about anyone, says Vasan. The lawsuit alleges that a Character.AI chatbot did little to stop — and even encouraged — a 14-year-old boy who told the chatbot he was going to kill himself.
Final thoughts on using Chatbots for forensic purposes
- For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models.
- This resulted in a huge amount of the gang’s internal data being leaked, including chat logs, encryption keys, Bitcoin wallets, details about how they operated, and more.
- Now, a small but powerful Quality of Life update gives users access to an image library where they can see all of the insane things they’ve created.
- When a chatbot invents information that it presents to a user as factual, it’s called a “hallucination.”
- This highlights the growing reliance on AI to enhance customer experience (CX) and streamline interactions.
- It gave a side-by-side comparison of the processes, clearly outlining the number of cell divisions, the genetic outcomes, and the biological roles of each.
My answer is that these chatbots’ claims of consciousness say nothing, one way or the other. Still, we must approach the issue with great care, taking the question of AI consciousness seriously, especially in the context of AIs with biological components. As we move forward, it will be crucial to separate intelligence from consciousness and to develop a richer understanding of how to detect consciousness in AIs. Large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini are essentially advanced text predictors, explains Dr. Peter Garraghan, CEO of Mindgard and Professor of Computer Science at Lancaster University. Yet, when trained on vast internet datasets, these systems can produce nonsensical or harmful outputs, such as Gemini’s infamous “Please die” response.
It will then use that answer to give you Richard Nixon as the answer to your original question, Hammond said. “You can say, ‘This is toxic, this is too political, this is opinion,’ and frame it not to generate those things,” said Kristian Hammond, a computer science professor at Northwestern University. Hammond is also the director of the university’s Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence. Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at /us).
If a Chatbot Tells You It Is Conscious, Should You Believe It?
Microsoft was an early investor in the rapid success of ChatGPT, quickly putting out its own model based on the same technology. Formerly called Bing Chat, it was officially rebranded as Microsoft Copilot in September 2023 and integrated into Windows 11 through a patch in December of that same year. Copilot serves as Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant, available through iOS and Android mobile apps, the Edge browser, as well as a web portal. Like Gemini, Copilot can integrate across Microsoft’s 365 app suite, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
“In addition, they don’t understand simple questions, and limit users to responses posed as prewritten messages.” Enterprise-ready, AI-equipped applications with LLMs like GPT can make a difference, he continued. A recent survey conducted by AI company Conversica shows that first-gen chatbots experienced by users are not living up to customer expectations. The firm said four out of five buyers abandon the chat experience if the answers don’t address their unique needs.
It first debuted in February 2023 as a replacement for the retired Cortana digital assistant. John Weaver, Chair of the AI Practice Group at McLane Middleton, points to Chinese chatbots trained on state-approved narratives. Chatbots are further trained by humans on how to provide appropriate responses and limit harmful messages.
ChatGPT: the latest news and updates on the AI chatbot that changed everything
These features make the chatbot a powerful tool for enhancing productivity, streamlining workflows, and improving user experience. But these AI chatbots can generate text of all kinds, from poetry to code, and the results really are exciting. ChatGPT remains in the spotlight, but as interest continues to grow, more rivals are popping up to challenge it. Given that humans and nonhuman animals exhibit consciousness, we have to take very seriously the possibility that future machines built with biological components might also possess consciousness.