FILE PHOTO: Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Representative Dean Phillips (D-MN) speaks at a campaign event ahead of the New Hampshire presidential primary election in Nashua, New Hampshire, U.S., January 20, 2024. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
(Reuters) - Microsoft-backed OpenAI has banned the developer of a bot mimicking Democratic presidential hopeful Congressman Dean Phillips, the first action the ChatGPT maker has taken in response to what it sees as a misuse of its artificial intelligence (AI) tools in a political campaign, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.
"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, who started a super PAC named We Deserve Better supporting Phillips, ahead of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, the report added.
The PAC has received $1 million from billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who called it "by far the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office" in a post on social media platform X.
The super PAC, had contracted with AI start-up Delphi to build the bot. OpenAI suspended Delphi's account late on Friday, noting that OpenAI's rules ban the use of its technology in political campaigns. Delphi took down Dean.Bot after the account suspension, the report added.
We Deserve Better did not immediately respond to a request for comment while Delphi could not be immediately reached for comment.
Dean.Bot, which had a disclaimer explaining that it was an AI tool, could converse with voters in real-time through a website, in an early use of an emerging technology that researchers have said could cause significant harm to elections, the Post reported.
(Reporting by Gursimran Kaur in Bengaluru; Editing by Sandra Maler)
