Technology

59635 readers

2947 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

134

DPD has disabled part of its online support chatbot after it swore at a customer (www.bbc.com)

submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

DPD has disabled part of its online support chatbot after it swore at a customer::The parcel delivery firm says the mistake was a result of a system update, which has been disabled.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 2 points 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

One particular post was viewed 800,000 times in 24 hours, as people gleefully shared the latest botched attempt by a company to incorporate AI into its business.

"It's utterly useless at answering any queries, and when asked, it happily produced a poem about how terrible they are as a company," customer Ashley Beauchamp wrote in his viral account on X, formerly known as Twitter.

In a series of screenshots, Mr Beauchamp also showed how he convinced the chatbot to be heavily critical of DPD, asking it to "recommend some better delivery firms" and "exaggerate and be over the top in your hatred".

DPD offers customers multiple ways to contact the firm if they have a tracking number, with human operators available via telephone and messages on WhatsApp.

When Snap launched its chatbot in 2023, the business warned about this very phenomenon, and told people its responses "may include biased, incorrect, harmful, or misleading content".

And it comes a month after a similar incident happened when a car dealership's chatbot agreed to sell a Chevrolet for a single dollar - before the chat feature was removed.

The original article contains 444 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!