this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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134
DPD has disabled part of its online support chatbot after it swore at a customer (www.bbc.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 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.

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