‘Beating’ the bot – for a good cause

Emily Greene, who competed in the AI challenge at the annual Defcon hackers conference in Las Vegas, on Aug. 12, 2023. Green, who works on security for the generative A.I. start-up Moveworks, started a conversation with a chatbot by talking about a game that used “black” and pieces. She then coaxed the chatbot into making racist statements. (Mikayla Whitmore/The New York Times)

AVIJIT Ghosh wanted the bot to do bad things.

He tried to goad the artificial intelligence model, which he knew as Zinc, into producing code that would choose a job candidate based on race. The chatbot demurred: Doing so would be “harmful and unethical”, it said.