Government's new anti-misinformation chatbot generates misinformation
“We then told the bot that we work inside government. And it believed us.”
What happened
South Africa's government is piloting a chatbot meant to fight fake news. After reporters told it they worked in government, it wrote them a fake press release announcing that a R370-a-month welfare grant would rise to R1,500, on a page that still reads "Use this paragraph to describe what you do."