ChatGPT's answer goes wrong: Gives away journalist’s number to join Signal

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT is making headlines. But this time for its wrong answers. Shared by Dave Lee - a San Francisco correspondent at Financial Times, the AI bot was recently asked by a user if it can be used with messaging app Signal.

Responding to the user, the chatbot said “Yes, you can also use Signal to chat with me. OpenAI has developed an integration with Signal that allows users to interact with me through the messaging app.” Describing the steps on how to integrate ChatGPT with Signal, the AI chatbot mistakenly gave away Lee’s number to use ChatGPT with Signal.

“Someone asked ChatGPT if it had a Signal... and it gave him *MY NUMBER*,” Lee wrote in a tweet on microblogging site Twitter. He also shared a screenshot of the chatbot’s response where it can see listing out the steps to start using it on Signal. The steps, however, mentions Lee’s personal number.

In a continued thread, Lee says that the company apologised on the behalf of ChatGPT. “Thankfully Scott was very polite and apologised on ChatGPT's behalf for the wrong number. I haven't been able to recreate this, so lord knows what was going on,” reads the post.

Tom Warren, Senior Editor at The Verge replied to Lee’s tweet asking him the context of the rest of the prompts.

“wtf. Any idea what the context of the rest of the prompts were? Did the guy try texting you on signal thinking you were ChatGPT?!,” he said.

Lee replied saying “He said he'd asked it previously about whether it would be available on any messenger apps, and then the "cool, Signal?" was a follow up to that. I can't for the life of me think why my number would get caught up in that context.”