OpenAI has suspended the developer behind Dean.Bot, a ChatGPT-powered bot designed to impersonate Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips to help bolster his campaign, according to The Washington Post. The chatbot was created by AI startup Delphi for the super PAC We Deserve Better, which supports Phillips. Dean.Bot didn't all-out pretend to be Phillips himself; before engaging with Dean.Bot, website visitors would be shown a disclaimer describing the nature of the chatbot. Still, this type of use goes directly against OpenAI's policies. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the developer's suspension in a statement to the Post. It comes just weeks after OpenAI published a lengthy blog post about the measures it's taking to prevent the misuse of its technology ahead of the 2024 elections, specifically citing "chatbots impersonating candidates" as an example of what's not allowed.

Baidu Inc. is planning to roll out an artificial intelligence chatbot service similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to a person familiar with the matter, potentially China's most prominent entry in a race touched off by the tech phenomenon. China's largest search engine company plans to debut a ChatGPT-style application in March, initially embedding it into its main search services, said the person, asking to remain unidentified discussing private information. The tool, whose name hasn't been decided, will allow users to get conversation-style search results much like OpenAI's popular platform.

So the ChatGPT language processing model burst upon an astonished world and the air was rent by squeals of delight and cries of outrage or lamentation. The delighted ones were those transfixed by discovering that a machine could apparently carry out a written commission competently. The outrage was triggered by fears of redundancy on the part of people whose employment requires the ability to write workmanlike prose. And the lamentations came from earnest folks (many of them teachers at various levels) whose day jobs involve grading essays hitherto written by students. If we know anything from history, it is that we generally overestimate the short-term impact of new communication technologies, while grossly underestimating their long-term implications.

'A confident bullshitter that can write very convincing nonsense': not a takedown of an annoying student or a former British prime minister, but a description of an artificial intelligence writing programme that is causing headaches for its makers. With fears in academia growing about a new AI chatbot that can write convincing essays – even if some facts it uses aren't strictly true – the Silicon Valley firm behind a chatbot released last month are racing to "fingerprint" its output to head off a wave of "AIgiarism" – or AI-assisted plagiarism. ChatGPT, an AI-based text generator that was released for public use in early December, has been praised and criticised alike for the quality of its output. Users can ask it questions ranging from simple factual queries ("What is the tallest mountain in Britain?") to absurd requests ("Write a limerick explaining the offside rule") and receive clear and coherent responses written in natural English. Headteachers and university lecturers have expressed concerns that ChatGPT, which can provide convincing human-sounding answers to exam questions, could spark a wave of cheating in homework and exam coursework.

Everyone has gone a bit ChatGPT bonkers at the moment. Talk is that this brilliant bot can produce blogs, articles, exam essays and editorials so well-written that they are impossible to differentiate from a human-produced text.