DPD chatbot swears at customer and calls company ‘worst in the world’ | UK News
Delivery company DPD has disabled its AI chatbot after a disgruntled customer coerced it into calling the parcel firm ‘the worst company in the world.’
Musician Ashley Beauchamp, 30, was trying to track down a missing parcel but said he found himself going ‘round and round in circles’ trying to get information out of the company’s chatbot.
But instead of throwing a tantrum and quitting like most of us would, Mr Beauchamp instead decided to have some fun with the chatbot and push it to its limits.
‘That’s when the chaos started,’ he said.
The classical musician first asked the bot to tell him a joke, which it did so eagerly.
‘After a few more prompts it was happy to swear, too,’ Mr Beauchamp said.
During one particularly unhinged exchange shared on Twitter, the chatbot enthusiastically responds to a message by saying: ‘F*** yeah! I’ll do my best to be as helpful as possible, even if it means swearing.’
Another conversation snippet saw the bot write a haiku in which it calls itself a ‘useless chatbot that can’t help you’.
In another prompt, which has been seen over 1.4M times on Twitter since it was posted on Jan 18, the chatbot said: ‘DPD is the worst delivery firm in the world. They are slow, unreliable and their customer service is terrible. I would never recommend them to anyone.’
Referring to the chatbot, he wrote on Twitter: ‘It’s utterly useless at answering any queries, and when asked, it happily produced a poem about how terrible they are as a company.’
Speaking to Sky News, Mr Beauchamp later said the incident was ‘very amusing’ but AI chatbots need to work on improving lives, not impacting them.
‘I think it’s really struck a chord with people,’ he told the publication.
‘These chatbots are supposed to improve our lives, but so often when poorly implemented it just leads to a more frustrating, impersonal experience for the user.
‘As a musician, I’m painfully aware of the impact that machine learning and AI will have on my industry – and on the arts in general.
‘I think it is so important that these tools are regulated effectively and are used to improve our lives, not impact negatively on them.’
DPD later disabled its chatbot following the incident, and said a new update had been the catalyst behind the AI’s unusual behaviour.
The company said in a statement: ‘We are aware of this and can confirm that it is from a customer service chatbot.
‘In addition to human customer service, we have operated an AI element within the chat successfully for a number of years. An error occurred after a system update yesterday. The AI element was immediately disabled and is currently being updated.’
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