OpenAI bans bot impersonating US presidential candidate
OpenAI banned the account behind an AI bot using deepfake technology to imitate Dean Phillips, a candidate running against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination. The bot, hosted on dean.bot and created with ChatGPT , breached OpenAI's rules against political campaigning and impersonating individuals without their consent, according to a release from the company. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Matt Krisiloff and Jed Somers, who also established a Super PAC named ‘We Deserve Better’ to support Phillips, were the key backers of the ‘Dean bot’. While OpenAI had stated that developers who use its technology must not engage in ‘political campaigning or lobbying’, the incident demonstrated the ease with which such policies can be ignorsed and inflamed concerns over the accessibility of deepfake and other synthetic media tools in politics. System 🤖 ChatGPT DeanBot 🔗 Operator: We Deserve Better (Super PAC) Developer: Delphi Country: USA Sector: Technology Purpose: Impersonate politician Technology: Chatbot; NLP/text analysis; Neural network; Deep learning; Machine learning; Reinforcement learning Issue: Dual/mu lti-use; Impersonation
- Date it happened
- 2024-01-01
- Organisation involved
- We Deserve Better (Super PAC)
- Product, system or model
- The Phillips Bot, ChatGPT
This incident was imported from AIAAIC and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.
This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.