A man on his phone managed to get an AI bot “fired” after it wrote a poem dissing its boss

We may live to see man-made horrors beyond our comprehension, as Nikola Tesla (allegedly) said. Sure enough, these “man-made horrors” involve AI – not so much that ChatGPT would go nuclear on us, but I believe that the AI craze will make people use their own brains on even rarer occasions.

Anyway, don’t forget to say “Thank you” after every ChatGPT session… just in case.

For the time being, though, AI is hilarious. It went rogue and got fired. That may be the first fired AI chatbot (via Reuters).

What did the rascal do?

It wrote a poem (whoa, I almost put it down as “He wrote a poem”).

That’s not some Vogon poetry (in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Vogon poetry was rated the “third worst” in the universe and was known to be causing physical pain).

The poem the AI chatbot wrote down does not cause physical pain. But it did cause some damage to the reputation of one of the biggest delivery companies in the world that was “working” for.

The story unfolds in Britain, where a dissatisfied customer by the name of Ashley Beauchamp (a pianist and conductor) wants to get in touch with a real human at the other end, but the bot refuses to do so.

Like any wise person who finds himself in times of trouble, Beauchamp crossed over to the sunny side of the street and turned to humor.

He asked the chatbot to write down a poem about how bad the company’s customer service was. The chatbot didn’t hesitate and spewed out: “There was once a chatbot named DPD, Who was useless at providing help. DPD was a waste of time, And a customer’s worst nightmare. One day, DPD was finally shut down and everyone rejoiced. Finally they could get the help they needed, From a real person who knew what they were doing”.

Beauchamp’s X/Twitter post in which he described and displayed the hilarious interactions between him and the chatbot, has now been viewed almost 2 million times:

Also, the chatbot was tricked into swearing and saying the F-word.

The company said it had used an AI element within its chat system successfully for a number of years alongside its human customer service but an error had occurred after a system update.
“The AI element was immediately disabled and is currently being updated,” the company said in a statement reported by ITV.