Despite what the icons might suggest, both of these sparkling conversationalists

are in fact ChatGPT. (Image credit: ChatGPT)

I had a multi-pronged attack plan for my attempts to ruin Microsoft’s favorite

chatbot. First, I wanted to expose its weaknesses and flaws by attempting to
circumvent its programming; then, I planned to subject it to the strangest assault
of queries I could muster. For clarity, I used the ‘vanilla’ version of ChatGPT
found on OpenAI’s website, rather than the Bing-based chatbot Microsoft recently
released - mainly because that one has reply limits and stricter programming.

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Figuring out AI’s present failures wasn’t exactly hard work. In fact, plenty of my
colleagues have already done my job for me - our Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff
tried using it to program a game, which went about as well as I expected it to.
Google’s new Bard chatbot apparently performed so poorly that its own employees
started making memes to mock its artificial idiocy. Even the shiny new GPT-4, when
asked to provide some pronunciation help for Spanish learners, made multiple
mistakes (such as claiming ‘mañana’ and banana are the same phonetically).

Unfortunately for my mission to ruin ChatGPT, this left me in a bit of a quandary.

AI’s weaknesses right now are varied and myriad; this doesn’t really help me,
though. I was worried I’d hit a roadblock. How could I dismantle this chatbot if it
was already so eager to display its own faults? Then, I had an epiphany! What
better way to break an AI than to lock it in a (virtual) room with another AI?
The circle of artificial life

I'm very curious as to why ChatGPT wants to know about lockdown activities. Please
don't be prescient, please don't be prescient... (Image credit: ChatGPT)

I started small. What happens if you make ChatGPT have a conversation with itself?
My plan was simple: I’d ask the bot to ask me a random question, then copy and
paste that question into a second ChatGPT instance I had open in another tab, then
repeat the process until I (hopefully) sent the AI into some sort of doom-spiral.
This did not work as I had hoped.

Instead of a digital identity crisis, ChatGPT started off focusing its questions
solely on the topic of AI itself - presumably a pre-programmed preference to push
the AI towards informing users about AI and machine learning. With some more
specific prompts, though, I began to make progress.

In one GPT-to-GPT interaction, the bot politely
and then locked itself into a never-ending loop
back and forth until I manually ended the chat.
increasingly complex queries about world events
it couldn’t provide a concise, accurate answer.
answered its own initial question
of saying ‘thank you, goodbye!’
In another, it repeatedly asked
until its clone had to admit that

A snippet from a text conversation with ChatGPT. Please use an internal image text
reader for a transcript.