Pranksters Successfully Trick DuckDuckGo’s AI Into Telling People Trump Died of Rabies

In some ways, AI is the perfect technology for America in the 2020s: An extremely expensive box that you pour an entire planet’s water, resources, computer hardware, and money into, so that you can then ask it questions and have it go, “Oh, yeah, man, I heard that, too.” 

Tragically, for those hoping to pass even more of their basic decision-making agency off to the “Sounds good, dawg” robot, that same buy-in on confirmation bias does leave the technology with a few minor weak points that nefarious agents can exploit. Like, say, its (surprisingly human) tendency to just give up on performing basic information gathering itself and go ask Reddit, which has now led at least one bot used by a major search engine to declare that the entire executive branch of the U.S. government is suffering from rabies.

This is per Futurism, which reports that search engine DuckDuckGo’s built-in AI feature recently began telling people that both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance were dead, after a supposedly rabid Vance—at Trump’s insistence, on the basis that it might grant him “superpowers”—bit the POTUS and infected him with the virus. This lovely little bit of fiction was quickly tracked back a subreddit that calls itself r/poisonai, which exists to create and support deliberately false narratives for our planet’s guileless automaton dolts to guzzle down. In this case, DuckDuckGo appears to have gotten extra confused because a fake news site that also appears to largely run off of AI ran a story sourced from poisonai’s work, and, baby, that’s called corroboration. 

All of which is very funny—even if it is a little ominous how easily these bots can be induced to begin spreading blatant misinformation. We’re just saying, it’s all fun and games when an imaginary Trump is frothing at the mouth, less so when actual political agents begin working from this exact same “deny reality until it changes” playbook.

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