OpenAI has banned the developer of a bot mimicking Democratic presidential candidate and Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips.
This marks the first move the ChatGPT maker has taken against what it views as a misuse of its artificial intelligence tools in a political campaign, according to a report from The Washington Post.
“We recently removed a developer account that was knowingly violating our API usage policies which disallow political campaigning, or impersonating an individual without consent,” a spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement to Reuters.
Dean.Bot, powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, was created by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Matt Krisiloff and Jed Somers. The two started We Deserve Better, a super PAC supporting Phillips, ahead of New Hampshire’s primary on Tuesday.
The PAC has received $1 million from billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who described his donation as “by far the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
We Deserve Better had contracted with AI start-up Delphi to create the bot. OpenAI suspended Delphi’s account late on Friday, saying OpenAI’s rules prohibit the use of its technology for political campaigns.
Delphi removed Dean.Bot following the account suspension.
Dean.Bot, which included a disclaimer that it was an AI tool, could speak to voters in real-time through a website. Some researchers have warned that this could cause significant harm to elections.
