• OpenAI has issued its first ever ban over the use of ChatGPT to create a bot impersonating a politician.
• The ban was issued to AI startup Delphi, which created Dean.Bot to assist Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips in raising campaign funding.
• OpenAI is keeping a close eye on how its technology is being used ahead of the 2024 US Elections.

As OpenAI has become the company of choice when it comes to leveraging publicly available artificial intelligence tools, it has come under increased scrutiny in terms of how it polices the use of its technology.

To that end, OpenAI has issued its first ban, with AI startup Delphi receiving one for its creation of the Dean.Bot using ChatGPT-powered tools.

The Dean.Bot was created to impersonate Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips in a bid to assist him in raising for campaign funding under the eye of super PAC We Deserve Better.

As Engadget points out, and to Delphi’s credit, anyone who visited the Dean.Bot website was informed clearly that the platform is indeed a facsimile of Phillips and not the real thing, with a notification popping up to explain precisely the AI elements at work.

“Hi! We’ve made an AI voice bot of Congressman Dean Phillips, Democratic candidate for President, that you can speak with,” the notification outlined.

“This is meant to be a fun educational tool, and it’s not perfect. The voice bot sounds like him and is programmed to draw on his ideas, but it’s possible it will say things that are wrong, incorrect, or shouldn’t be said,” it added.

However, this is still in contravention of what OpenAI detailed in terms of what it will be looking out for this year in particular as several elections are occurring across the globe in 2024.

In a blog post, the company specifically highlighted it is working to, “anticipate and prevent relevant abuse—such as misleading ‘deepfakes’, scaled influence operations, or chatbots impersonating candidates.”

“As we prepare for elections in 2024 across the world’s largest democracies, our approach is to continue our platform safety work by elevating accurate voting information, enforcing measured policies, and improving transparency. We have a cross-functional effort dedicated to election work, bringing together expertise from our safety systems, threat intelligence, legal, engineering, and policy teams to quickly investigate and address potential abuse,” OpenAI continued.

While Delphi’s use of ChatGPT is rather mild in comparison to some of the misinformation campaigns that ran rife during the 2016 and 2020 US Elections, this ban does set down a marker for other companies aiming to use OpenAI’s technology for candidates and politicians this year.

With this first ban being doled out, it will be interesting to see how effectively OpenAI will police and monitor the use of its technology the closer we get to the US Presidential elections officially kicking off.

[Image – Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash]