Honeybot

OpenAI plans to allow a wider range of content, including erotica, on its popular chatbot ChatGPT as part of its push to “treat adult users like adults”, says its boss Sam Altman.

‘Written erotica does not require age verification in the UK under the Online Safety Act so children under 18 will be able to access this ‘erotica’. Vulnerable young men may be the obvious target of this honeybot but “How are they going to make sure that children are not able to access the portions of ChatGPT that are adult-only and provide erotica?” said Jenny Kim, a partner at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.’

I wonder if this honeybot might also operate along the lines of the classic honey pot as set out here

A honey pot, is an espionage practice that leverages romantic and or sexual relations. This is done to gain access to information that would be otherwise classified. This form of espionage known as sexpionage, is the involvement of sexual activity to conduct espionage actions. This can involve gaining access to classified information or access to locations holding data.
The honey-pot involves identifying and engaging with targets who have information that is deemed as valuable. The trapper will seek to engage in a false relationship with the victim. This relationship can be used to gain access to classified data. It can involve physical relationships however in the modern day there has been an increase in cyber-honey trapping. This tactic is highly controversial and has been employed since the early half of the 20th century. 

Edwin Taylor – Greydynamics

Artificial Intelligence was originally developed by the military. When AI then became commercially available to the general public, it came with a software background in military grade surveillance and PSYOP (psychological operations) Could ‘Honeybot’ ChatGPT be used as part of psychological operations?

Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and large foreign powers.

Wikipedia

The honeybot is apparently going to be unleashed into children’s bedrooms and likely to be targeting vulnerable young men. But there will be many adults who are seduced by sensual, sexual ‘erotica’ or just ‘companionship’ which can be leveraged like an old fashioned honeypot.

THe ChatGPT LLM chatbot has been described as a “privacy black hole,” with concerns about the way it treats data entered by users, which even led to it being briefly banned in Italy.

‘Its creator, OpenAI, makes no secret of the fact that any data entered may not be secure. As well as put to use to further train its models, possibly leading to its exposure in output to other people, it can be reviewed by humans to check for compliance with rules about how it can be used. And, of course, any data sent to any cloud service is only as secure as the provider’s security.’ I covered this in an earlier blog entitled ‘The Cloud Act’.

Of course some authoritarian governments like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran or even the US Trump current administration might find the honeybot useful for ‘a thousand grains’ of data; to profile, leverage, target or just plain old spy on people who are seduced to interact with honeybots.