DPD chatbot swears and criticises company after 'attack' by disgruntled customer
Arno Senoner/Unsplash.
UK delivery company DPD has disabled part of its artificial intelligence chatbot due to an incident involving swearing and criticising the firm. It is learnt that 30-year-old musician Ashley Beauchamp decided to "experiment" with the AI chatbot when it failed to help find a lost parcel.
Here's What We Know
In response to Beauchamp's requests, the chatbot started telling jokes and even composed a "poem about what a terrible company" DPD is. It also swore profanities and called itself "useless".
Parcel delivery firm DPD have replaced their customer service chat with an AI robot thing. It's utterly useless at answering any queries, and when asked, it happily produced a poem about how terrible they are as a company. It also swore at me. ???? pic.twitter.com/vjWlrIP3wn
- Ashley Beauchamp (@ashbeauchamp) January 18, 2024
- AI wrote in one of the posts.
According to Beauchamp, the incident shows the dangers of poorly implemented chatbots, which instead of improving the service only make it worse. His tweet about his conversation with AI racked up 800,000 views in 24 hours.
The company promised to solve the customer's problem with the parcel and said that the artificial intelligence elements in their chatbot have been working for several years.
"An error occurred after a system update yesterday. The AI element was immediately disabled and is currently being updated" DPD commented.
Source: The Guardian
