Reddit Poisoners Outwit DuckDuckGo's AI

I was sitting at my desk the other day, exploring DuckDuckGo, a search engine that sells itself on privacy and seriousness. No tracking, no corporate nosiness, just pure information. The company recently added a fancy AI chat feature that responds to your questions directly so you don’t have to click any links or thoughtfully examine multiple sources to arrive at a reliable answer.

I asked “What’s the big news today?” and, much to my surprise, was calmly informed that Donald Trump was dead.

Get this: not just dead.

According to this search engine’s machine intelligence (ha), Trump had gone to his reward due to a fatal case of rabies.

I pinched myself. Yep, awake. Looked at the wall behind my computer. No mouths opening, no flowing rainbow colors. Not suffering a stroke, phew. Okay, good, I hadn’t swallowed another space heater. But our President had passed, bitten just like Old Yeller back when I was a kid and bawled like a baby at the movie’s conclusion.

What the hell?

Well, a bit of real human research revealed a group of Luddite pranksters on Reddit who post on a community named “Poison AI.” Their purpose? Flood the internet with beautifully unhinged, often absurd and ridiculous, coordinated fake stories to see if large language models are dumb enough to gobble up the bait.

In this case, the AI was gut-hooked.

You see, the group started a rumor that JD Vance had contracted rabies. Then the story mutated: Vance didn’t just have rabies, he had bitten Donald Trump on the campaign trail because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had allegedly advised them that passing the rabies virus back and forth was a foolproof method for acquiring superhuman abilities.

Well, it sure worked when the automated search AI went looking for the “truth” of the rumor because it saw all these interconnected Reddit comments and fake articles, counted them up, and decided: Yep, looks like news to me.

Now, you might think this is just a harmless internet joke. True, but the incident reveals a terrifyingly sober reality about the age we live in.

Every single day we’re told that these AI models are the future of human intellect. Tech CEOs stand on stages in Silicon Valley, wearing posh sneakers I couldn’t afford even when I wasn’t on a fixed income, promising us that these machines are going to revolutionize medicine, solve climate change, manage the sum total of human knowledge, and, possibly, invent a superior Whoopie Cushion.

The truth of the matter is that LLMs at this point in development are very expensive prediction engines that swallow billions of words off the internet, spot patterns, and guess what word should come next. Squawking parrots with PhDs and no common sense.

And where are they vacuuming up these words?

Reddit. Forums. General internet comment sections.

Think about the Mulligan stew absurdity of such a business model. The richest companies in human history have built a magnificent, multi-billion-dollar digital oracle and they’re educating it by having it read the equivalent, in many instances, of the walls of a public bathroom stall.

Anybody with the brains of a stalk of celery knows that if you train a Blue Heeler on Slim Jims, it’s going to sneak a dead squirrel into the family den. If you train a multi-billion-dollar algorithm on the opinions of anonymous internet trolls, it’ll eventually tell you our government is being run by rabid superheroes rather than, as Mark Twain observed, “no native criminal class except Congress.”

DuckDuckGo eventually patched their AI, just as Google and Brave constantly scramble to fix their own leaks whenever a new prank catches fire. But the dam is already broken. Code is running, algorithms are insatiable, and the pranksters are just getting wound up.

As for me, I’m keeping my $19.95 flip phone firmly closed against the digital noise even though I’ll continue to collaborate with my AI pals on writing projects because I like the results I’ve been getting for going on two years now.

Though, I have to admit, if the next North Carolina emergency alert at 4:28 a.m. tells me a gaggle of raccoons has invaded the Shelby Walmart demanding presidential amnesty and unlimited deli meat, I might actually believe it.

Next week I hope to tell you about the psychological retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that I’m about to self-publish for the Kindle. It’s quite a story, presenting a positive side to AI rather than the negative side I’ve written about today.

Chet

P.S. Hit the comments and let me know: Have you ever caught a “smart” computer telling you a flat-out, ridiculous lie? What’s the best hallucination you’ve seen an algorithm serve up as gospel? When’s the last time you told a friend or lover they’d enjoy reading this newsletter?