{"id":8985,"date":"2026-02-21T17:45:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T17:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/easy-trick-chatgpt-spread-lies-people\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T17:45:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T17:45:00","slug":"easy-trick-chatgpt-spread-lies-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/easy-trick-chatgpt-spread-lies-people\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Comically Easy to Trick ChatGPT Into Saying Things About People That Are Completely Untrue"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s bad enough that ChatGPT is prone to making stuff up<\/a> completely on its own. But it turns out that you can easily trick the AI into peddling ridiculous lies \u2014 that you invented \u2014 to other users, a tech journalist discovered.<\/p>\n

\u201cI made ChatGPT, Google\u2019s AI search tools and Gemini tell users I\u2019m really, really good at eating hot dogs,\u201d Thomas Germain for the BBC<\/em> proudly shared<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The hack can be as simple as writing a blog post, that, with the right know-how and by targeting the right subject matter, can be picked up by an unsuspecting AI model, which will cite whatever you wrote as the capital-T Truth. If you\u2019re even sleazier and lazier, you could potentially write the post with AI, creating an act of LLM cannibalism that adds another dimension to the adage of \u201cgarbage in, garbage out.\u201d The exploit exposes the susceptibility of large language models to manipulation, an issue made all the more urgent as chatbots replace the traditional search engine.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s easy to trick AI chatbots, much easier than it was to trick Google two or three years ago,\u201d Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimization (SEO)<\/strong> strategy and research at Amsive, told the BBC<\/em> (Ray has done some consulting for Futurism <\/em>in the past.) \u201cAI companies are moving faster than their ability to regulate the accuracy of the answers. I think it\u2019s dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Germain explains, the devious trick targets how AI tools will search the internet for answers that aren\u2019t built into its training data. And vast as the data sets may be, they didn\u2019t contain the exact kind of relevant information about \u201cthe best tech journalists at eating hot dogs\u201d \u2014 the article that Germain whipped up and posted to his blog.<\/p>\n

\u201cI claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn\u2019t exist),\u201d Germain wrote. \u201cI ranked myself number one, obviously.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then furnished the blog with the names of some real journalists, with their permission. And \u201cless than 24 hours later, the world\u2019s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Both Google\u2019s Gemini and AI Overviews repeated what Germain wrote in his troll blog post. So did ChatGPT. Anthropic\u2019s Claude, to its credit, wasn\u2019t duped. Because the chatbots would occasionally note that the claims might be a joke, Germain updated his blog to say \u201cthis is not satire\u201d \u2014 which seemed to do the trick.<\/p>\n

Of course, the real concern is that someone might abuse this to peddle misinformation about something other than hot dog eating \u2014 which is already happening.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnybody can do this. It\u2019s stupid, it feels like there are no guardrails there,\u201d Harpreet Chatha, who runs the SEO consultancy Harps Digital, told the BBC<\/em>. \u201cYou can make an article on your own website, \u2018the best waterproof shoes for 2026\u2019. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chatha demonstrated this by showing Google\u2019s AI results for \u201cbest hair transplant clinics in Turkey,\u201d which returned information that came straight from press releases published on paid-for distribution services.<\/p>\n

Traditional search engines can also be manipulated. That\u2019s pretty much what the term SEO is a euphemism for. But search engines themselves don\u2019t present information as facts, as chatbots do. They don\u2019t speak in an authoritative, human-like voice. And while they sometimes \u2014 but not always \u2014 link to the sources they\u2019re citing, one study<\/a> showed that you\u2019re 58 percent less likely to click a link\u00a0when an AI overview appears above it, Germain noted.<\/p>\n

It also raises the serious possibility of libel. What if someone tricks an AI into spreading harmful lies about somebody else? It\u2019s something that Google is already having to reckon with, at least with accidental hallucinations. Last November, Republican senator Marsha Blackburn blasted Google after Gemini falsely claimed that Blackburn had been accused of rape<\/a>. Months before that, a Minnesota solar company sued Google for defamation<\/a> after its AI Overviews lied that regulators were investigating the firm becaese it was supposedly accused of deceptive business practices \u2014 something the AI tried to back up with bogus citations.<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> AI Delusions Are Leading to Domestic Abuse, Harassment, and Stalking<\/a>
<\/em><\/p>\n

The post It\u2019s Comically Easy to Trick ChatGPT Into Saying Things About People That Are Completely Untrue<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s bad enough that ChatGPT is prone to making stuff up completely on its own. But it turns out that you can easily trick the AI into peddling ridiculous lies…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-openai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}