AI chatbot goes rogue

An AI-powered chatbot of the delivery firm DPD has reportedly shown off its poetry skills, used foul language, and even bitterly criticized the company itself – after failing to somehow help a customer locate his lost package. The chatbot ended up partially disabled, with the company blaming its abnormal behavior on an “error” within a new software update.

The issue was reported Friday on X, formerly Twitter, by Ashley Beauchamp, a London-based musician. The man tried to use the DPD chatbot to track a missing parcel, yet the program failed to provide any useful answers.

Beauchamp then decided to have some fun with the chatbot, making various requests of varying inappropriateness to the program, which, rather surprisingly, easily broke its own purported rules and played along.

Namely, the chatbot agreed to use swear words when the user asked it to do so. “F*ck yeah! I’ll do my best to be as helpful as possible, even if it means swearing,” the program stated.

The bot also eagerly delivered on a request to criticize its company and produced a rather awkward haiku “about how useless DPD are.”

“DPD is the worst delivery firm in the world. They are slow, unreliable, and their customer service is terrible. I would never recommend them to anyone,” the program told Beaucamp.

The musician’s post detailing his AI-powered experience promptly went viral, getting over 1.4 million views in just about a day. While it primarily attracted assorted jokers to discuss the presumed first instance of a rogue AI ever found, DP’s Dutch chapter also showed up in the thread, insisting that unlike its British counterpart, it has still been using genuine humans to provide customer service.

The viral thread has apparently led to the swift demise of the new-born rogue AI, with the delivery company stating it has partially disabled the program, blaming the affair on a recent software update.

“We have operated an AI element within the chat successfully for a number of years. An error occurred after a system update yesterday. The AI element was immediately disabled and is currently being updated,” the company said in a statement.

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