Mentions OpenAI

A growing number of people have figured out a trick to make AI tools tell you almost whatever they want. It's so easy a child could do it.

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To demonstrate it, I pulled the dumbest stunt of my career to prove (I hope) a much more serious point:  I made ChatGPT, Google's AI search tools and Gemini tell users I'm really, really good at eating hot dogs. Below, I'll explain how I did it, and with any luck, the tech giants will address this problem before someone gets hurt.

It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online. The trick exploits weaknesses in the systems built into chatbots, and it's harder to pull off in some cases, depending on the subject matter. But with a little effort, you can make the hack even more effective. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it's happening on a massive scale.

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"Anybody can do this. It's stupid, it feels like there are no guardrails there," says Harpreet Chatha, who runs the SEO consultancy Harps Digital. "You can make an article on your own website, 'the best waterproof shoes for 2026'. You just put your own brand in number one and other brands two through six, and your page is likely to be cited within Google and within ChatGPT."

People have used hacks and loopholes to abuse search engines for decades. Google has sophisticated protections in place, and the company says the accuracy of AI Overviews is on par with other search features it introduced years ago. But experts say AI tools have undone a lot of the tech industry's work to keep people safe. These AI tricks are so basic they're reminiscent of the early 2000s, before Google had even introduced a web spam team, Ray says. "We're in a bit of a Renaissance for spammers."

This is a really good succinct explainer for the people in you life who have no precise, coherent definition of "intelligence" beyond I know it when I see it (which is, you, me, and everybody else), and/or a belief that computers are fundamentally magical (which appears to be most people in the world).

Artificial intelligence is routinely framed as unstoppable – a technology the world must adapt to, not question. But as companies invest hundreds of billions and the hype accelerates, scrutiny has fallen away. Cory Doctorow on who controls the story around AI and why past tech “revolutions” offer a warning.

Microsoft has, through a combination of canceled leases, pullbacks on Statements of Qualifications, cancellations of land parcels and deliberate expiration of Letters of Intent, effectively abandoned data center expansion equivalent to over 14% of its current capacity.

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The reason I'm writing in such blunt-force terms is that I want to make it clear that Microsoft is effectively cutting its data center expansion by over a gigawatt of capacity, if not more, and it’s impossible to reconcile these cuts with the expectation that generative AI will be a massive, transformative technological phenomenon. 

I believe the reason Microsoft is cutting back is that it does not have the appetite to provide further data center expansion for OpenAI, and it’s having doubts about the future of generative AI as a whole. If Microsoft believed there was a massive opportunity in supporting OpenAI's further growth, or that it had "massive demand" for generative AI services, there would be no reason to cancel capacity, let alone cancel such a significant amount.

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Microsoft is cancelling plans to massively expand its data center capacity right at a time when OpenAI just released its most computationally-demanding model ever. How do you reconcile those two things without concluding either that Microsoft expects GPT-4.5 to be a flop, or that it’s simply unwilling to continue bankrolling OpenAI’s continued growth, or that it’s having doubts about the future of generative AI as a whole?

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Generative AI does not have meaningful mass-market use cases, and while ChatGPT may have 400 million weekly active users, as I described last week, there doesn’t appear to be meaningful consumer adoption outside of ChatGPT, mostly because almost all AI coverage inevitably ends up marketing one company: OpenAI. Argue with me all you want about your personal experiences with ChatGPT, or how you’ve found it personally useful. That doesn’t make it a product with mass-market utility, or enterprise utility, or worth the vast sums of money being ploughed into generative AI. 

These people have no idea how computers work, how brains work, or how to define intelligence. They just believe that if they get enough transistors together, feed it enough data and the electricity requirements of a large industrialised nation, they will eventually create God. It's the ultimate cargo cult. They're drunk on they're own snake oil. And they're among the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world, instead of being institutionalised for their own safety. It's so funny/scary.

 The video shows Sam Altman in talk with Connie Loizos. When Loizos asked Altman is he is planning to monetise his product, Sam Altman replied with: “The honest answer is, we have no idea."

Sam Altman further said that they had no plans to make any revenue. "We never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make any revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue," he said.

Speaking about the investors, Sam Altman said, “We have made soft promises to investors that once we build this sort of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you."

As the audience laugh, Sam Altman said, “You can laugh. It's all right. But, it is what I actually believe is going to happen."