ChatGPT Confesses to a Crime It Didn’t Commit

Radley Balko reports that it wasn’t hard to get ChatGPT to confess it had hacked into someone’s email and sent unauthorized text messages to all his contacts. That’s a crime (granted, most things are, unless you’re the president), but it’s also something ChatGPT isn’t even capable of doing. So why would it confess that it did? There are at least two answers. First, of course, a generative AI doesn’t know or care whether what it says is true or false. It does not know the difference. It is not even designed to deliver right answers. We’ve been over that before, repeatedly, but then I’ve also been saying for years that jumping into water to escape from police is generally pointless, apparently to little effect. Yet the struggle continues. Second, and the point of Balko’s article, is that ChatGPT’s interrogator was using “the Reid Technique,” an interrogation method developed in the 1950s that is now used by police all over the country. Basically, it involves telling suspects that police…