Editing Chatbot (section)

=== Malicious use ===
Malicious chatbots are frequently used to fill [[chat rooms]] with spam and advertisements by mimicking human behavior and conversations or to entice people into revealing personal information, such as bank account numbers. They were commonly found on [[Yahoo! Messenger]], [[Windows Live Messenger]], [[AOL Instant Messenger]] and other [[instant messaging]] protocols. There has also been a published report of a chatbot used in a fake personal ad on a dating service's website.<ref>{{cite web|work=Scientific American: Mind|date=October 2007|pages=16–17|url=http://drrobertepstein.com/downloads/FROM_RUSSIA_WITH_LOVE-Epstein-Sci_Am_Mind-Oct-Nov2007.pdf|title=From Russia With Love: How I got fooled (and somewhat humiliated) by a computer|access-date=9 December 2007|author=Epstein, Robert|archive-date=19 October 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101019210430/http://drrobertepstein.com/downloads/FROM_RUSSIA_WITH_LOVE-Epstein-Sci_Am_Mind-Oct-Nov2007.pdf|url-status=live}}
Psychologist [[Robert Epstein]] reports how he was initially fooled by a chatterbot posing as an attractive girl in a personal ad he answered on a dating website. In the ad, the girl portrayed herself as being in Southern California and then soon revealed, in poor English, that she was actually in Russia. He became suspicious after a couple of months of email exchanges, sent her an email test of gibberish, and she still replied in general terms. The dating website is not named.</ref>

[[Tay (bot)|Tay]], an AI chatbot designed to learn from previous interaction, caused major controversy due to it being targeted by internet trolls on Twitter. Soon after its launch, the bot was exploited, and with its "repeat after me" capability, it started releasing racist, sexist, and controversial responses to Twitter users.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Neff |first1=Gina |last2=Nagy |first2=Peter |date=2016-10-12 |title=Automation, Algorithms, and Politics{{!}} Talking to Bots: Symbiotic Agency and the Case of Tay |url=https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/6277 |journal=International Journal of Communication |language=en |volume=10 |pages=17 |issn=1932-8036}}</ref> This suggests that although the bot learned effectively from experience, adequate protection was not put in place to prevent misuse.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Bird |first1=Jordan J. |last2=Ekart |first2=Aniko |last3=Faria |first3=Diego R. |title=Advances in Computational Intelligence Systems |chapter=Learning from Interaction: An Intelligent Networked-Based Human-Bot and Bot-Bot Chatbot System |series=Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing |date=June 2018 |volume=840 |publisher=Springer |location=Nottingham, UK |isbn=978-3-319-97982-3 |pages=179–190 |doi=10.1007/978-3-319-97982-3_15 |s2cid=52069140 |edition=1st}}</ref>

If a text-sending [[algorithm]] can pass itself off as a human instead of a chatbot, its message would be more credible. Therefore, human-seeming chatbots with well-crafted online identities could start scattering fake news that seems plausible, for instance making false claims during an election. With enough chatbots, it might be even possible to achieve artificial [[social proof]].<ref>{{cite web | url= https://www.sciencenews.org/article/twitter-bots-fake-news-2016-election | author= Temming, Maria | title= How Twitter bots get people to spread fake news | work= Science News | date= 20 November 2018 | access-date= 20 November 2018 | archive-date= 27 November 2018 | archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20181127191003/https://www.sciencenews.org/article/twitter-bots-fake-news-2016-election | url-status= live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web 
| author = Epp, Len 
| url = https://lenepp.medium.com/five-potential-malicious-uses-for-chatbots-a15f4955fba7 
| title = Five Potential Malicious Uses For Chatbots 
| date = 11 May 2016 | access-date = 24 February 2023 | archive-date = 24 February 2023 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20230224041222/https://lenepp.medium.com/five-potential-malicious-uses-for-chatbots-a15f4955fba7 
| url-status = live 
}}</ref>