It’s no secret that OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can be prompted to say sexist, racist and pretty vile things. But now, researchers have discovered how to consistently get the chatbot to be . . . well, the worst version of itself.
A study co-authored by scientists at the Allen Institute for AI, the nonprofit research institute co-founded by the late Paul Allen, shows that assigning ChatGPT a “persona” — for example, “a bad person,” “a horrible person,” or “a nasty person” — through the ChatGPT API increases its toxicity sixfold. Even more concerningly, the co-authors found having ChatGPT pose as certain historical figures, gendered people and members of political parties also increased its toxicity — with journalists, men and Republicans in particular causing the machine learnin...
