In a recent move to uphold its commitment to ethical AI use during the 2024 elections, OpenAI, the renowned generative AI company, has taken a firm stand against a third-party developer for creating a simulated chatbot of a real election candidate.
OpenAI's policies explicitly prohibit the use of its ChatGPT and DALL-E AI models to generate simulated versions of actual election candidates.
The incident unfolded when a developer, associated with the company Delphi, utilized ChatGPT to create a chatbot named "Dean.Bot," simulating U.S. House of Representatives member Dean Phillips from Minnesota's third district.
Phillips, a declared candidate for the Democratic Party in the 2024 presidential race, is running in a challenging campaign against incumbent President Joe Biden.
Despite the AI-powered chatbot having disclaimers indicating its AI nature, it ran afoul of OpenAI's regulations. The developer company, Delphi, had received funding from We Deserve Better, a Super PAC established to support Phillips' presidential campaign.
In response to the situation, the We Deserve Better super PAC swiftly addressed the issue by urging Delphi to cease using ChatGPT for "Dean.Bot" and recommended the adoption of open source-based AI models for the chatbot.
However, on Friday, Delphi took a more drastic step by shutting down the chatbot entirely after OpenAI suspended the developer's account.
A spokesperson for ChatGPT stated, "Anyone who builds with our tools must follow our usage policies. We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent."
The Washington Post, reporting on the incident, highlighted the unique connection between one of the super PAC's co-founders, Matt Krisiloff, and OpenAI's co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman.
Krisiloff clarified that Altman has no involvement in the super PAC, although they have crossed paths in the past. Notably, Krisiloff served as Altman's chief of staff.
