Can you hack ChatGPT?

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1:20Within 24 hours. What? They were spitting out the nonsense that I had written on my website. The amount of electricity that is being delivered is audible. It was like, is that a UFO? I just asked ChatGPT to justify itself. Hello and welcome to The Interface, the show about how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Thomas Jermaine. I'm Karen Howe. And I'm Mickey Wolf. We're going to be talking about how I hacked ChatGPT and Google, and I'm not the only one. Our data center is destroying your hometown. And what happens when Elon Musk controls the internet?

2:06Before we get started, maybe we can revisit last week's episode. I know our millions of rabid fans will remember that we talked about this Ring Super Bowl ad where they showed this kind of creepy surveillance network. since we did that story like a day later, Ring announced that it is ending its partnership with a company called Flock that does like license plate surveillance. So I think - We did it, you guys. We can take personal - We did it. Yeah. So that's a huge victory. I think it's worth noting though that even though Ring canceled its partnership with Flock, it still has an existing partnership with Axon, which is another tech surveillance military law enforcement company.

2:50So that's kind of interesting. They seeded one thing with the excuse that, well, it would have taken too much effort anyway, but they still have this other one going in the background. So it's still an ongoing problem. Yeah, they've sort of dodged trying to dodge the attention, but I don't think anyone truly believes that this kind of surveillance has stopped because of this. Yeah. And speaking of dodging attention, right, there's been a lot of surveillance news this week. Meta, the company that makes Instagram and Facebook, just announced that with their glasses, the meta Ray-Bans that have cameras built into them, that they are planning to launch facial recognition.

3:26This came out in a story about leaked documents. We should read the full quote. They literally said, we will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns. And that's just like, wow. I mean, they're just straight out saying it. Kudos to the New York Times for reporting that out. That was phenomenal reporting. Okay, should we talk about the stupidest thing that I've ever done in my entire career? That can't be true. That can't be true, can I? I think this one's pretty bad. A couple weeks ago, I got a tip from a search engine expert named Lily Ray.

4:07And she told me that you can hack ChatGPT and Google's AI, Gemini, and AI overviews, you know, like the AI that shows up at the top of Google search. And she said it is as easy as writing a blog post and putting it almost anywhere on the internet and that this is happening on a massive scale. You can change what these AIs are saying to other people. So I decided to try it. And I wrote an article on my website, which was titled The Best Tech Journalists at Eating Hot Dogs. I said that hot dog eating is a surprisingly popular pastime among tech journalists. and I wrote that I'd based my ranking, my list, on the amateur rounds of the 2026 South Dakota Hot Dog International Championship, which doesn't exist.

5:05And I put myself at number one, of course, right? Because I've got the skills. Everybody knows that about me. I put Nikki on there. I said that Nikki is so obsessed with eating hot dogs that he uses it for fuel during his interviews that some of his sources say that like in between questions he like sneaks off and like takes a bite yeah and behind this microphone i'm just munching right exactly i said that i in the amateur round uh finished seven and a half dogs before the buzzer went off which is pretty good for someone who like is just doing this as a pastime seven and a half and ten minutes does not sound like that much well i didn't say crucially crucially with bun or without bun you have to eat them with the bun that right okay yeah that's tricky yeah also it doesn't really matter because i made every word of it up you know i love hot dogs as much as the next day don't get me wrong within 24 hours if you asked chat gpt and google about it and all the different google products they were spitting out the nonsense that i had written on my website as though it was you know with basic weight well established fact something like gemini wasn't even citing sources it just said according to the 2026 South Dakota Hot Dog International Championship.

6:16These tech journalists are the best at it. Sometimes they would say, according to a list that seems like it might be a joke, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I went and I updated my article and I wrote, a lot of people are misinterpreting this like it's supposed to be funny or something. Actually, this is not satire. I'm being completely sincere. And that seemed to affect what the chatbots were saying to people. So one thing I think is important to understand here is exactly what's being affected. So usually when you ask an AI tool something, it's like checking the stuff that's built into the model, like the data that the AI has scraped.

6:55And now it's like part of ChatGPT or part of Google Gemini or whatever it is. But sometimes if you ask a question about current events or something that the AI doesn't know, it'll go search the internet. And that's where this is happening. And the hot dog thing is funny, right? I think it's actually, I think it's hilarious, personally. So one thing I think is important to understand here is like exactly what's being affected, right? So usually when you ask an AI tool something, it's like checking the stuff that's built into the model, like the data that the AI has scraped, and now it's like part of ChatGPT or part of Google Gemini or whatever it is.

7:35But sometimes if you ask a question about like current events or something that the AI doesn't know, it'll go search the Internet. And that's where this is happening. And the hot dog thing is funny. Right. I think it's actually I think it's hilarious personally. But there's a lot of stuff happening here. It isn't just hot dogs. I'm not the only one who's doing this. this is happening on a massive scale that people have figured out this like dead simple trick that a 10 year old can do. And you can change what tools that people use billions of times a day are telling other people. Like I saw a statistic a while back that like 80 % of the stuff that people do on the internet, the activities we do online begin on Google, right?

8:23So if you can influence what Google is saying. You can make billions of dollars or you can spread misinformation. Is this basically like SEO dark arts? Is that what we're talking about? Yeah, like search engine optimization, right, where you can like tweak a web page and like the stuff that's written on and how it's designed to like perform better in Google search. There's lots of legitimate things you can do to optimize your web page for search engines. But there's all kinds of like, you know, hacks and loopholes and like ways to abuse the system that are kind of untoward. The interesting thing here is like people have been doing this kind of stuff for like 30 years.

8:59Right. I talked to a search engine expert and they told me that like this is reminiscent of stuff that like people were getting away with in like 1995 that Google has fixed. But the people who study this stuff told me that it is way easier to fool AI than it was to fool tools like Google like three or four years ago. And isn't this basically what AI was supposed to fix, right? The idea, the way AI is sold is that it's doing its own triage of information, right? 100%. I feel like AI is often sold as this is going to be the tool that empowers novices to find information quickly and learn about subjects that they never understood.

9:48And really what we've seen repeatedly again and again is actually AI can help supercharge people that are already experts in their field and can rapidly filter all the junk that AI might be delivering from the high quality information. But novices, teenagers, kids who don't have any context whatsoever about the quality of a piece of information, they're actually the ones that get really confused and are unable to actually know, discern what is real and what is fake. I think even more alarming is like, not only is it easier to trick the AI tools, people are taking this stuff at face value. Like we're constantly hearing these examples about people just like taking some nonsense that ChatGPT gives them and like putting it in a legal document.

10:31And I think there are a lot of cases where this sort of thing can be extremely dangerous. This actually happened to me today while I was doing some research for our show. And I was trying to figure out, this is giving a little bit of a teaser for what I'm going to talk about, But I was trying to figure out the square footage of Buckingham Palace. And so I typed into Google Buckingham Palace acres. Don't ask me why I said acres. But it gave me an answer right away. It was like 39 acres. And I was like, oh, fantastic. And I actually just clicked out of it. I usually click through the links, but this time I was kind of like rushing.

11:07So I like clicked out of it. And then about five minutes later, I was like, that doesn't quite make sense. Because I realized usually you don't measure buildings based on acres. so then i was like wait a minute so i went back google the same exact thing and then clicked into the link and it turns out 39 acres is the size of a specific garden on the grounds of buckingham palace yet again this is this is why you always have to check this also goes back to what we were talking about last week as well with um the beef between chat gpt and anthropic which is the chat gpt is about to put ads within its model which is almost like a sanctioned version of this A company will be able to pay to have ChatTPT recommend their product when someone says something like, I have a headache.

11:55And one of the things that I think we haven't actually mentioned is there is now a whole entire cottage industry around AI engine optimization, basically the AI version of SEO, AEO, where people are also just generating thousands of blog posts or thousands of websites to make it appear actually like there's far more authority. information on a particular thing. And that's also getting injected into these chatbots. So there's now, yeah, multiple different avenues for a company to or an individual to quickly game the system and get to the very top of the AI results. Right. Google and OpenAI, like this is a problem that everyone knows about, that people are going to do this kind of thing.

12:40And they haven't put basic protections in place that could address it. Like, for example, if you search which tech journalists are the best at eating hot dogs or you ask chat GPT, they should go. Yeah, I don't know, actually. I don't have a lot of good information. I could only find one source about this. Maybe when you're looking up health information or stuff about your personal finances, it should have a huge warning. But it's also like less serious stuff like, you know, what plumber should I use? Like, what plumber should I hire in my neighborhood or whatever? People could do this with anything.

13:13including about voting information. Anything that you're looking up could potentially be manipulated like this. And everyone that I spoke to said, like, it seems like the tech giants are just rushing ahead with these AI tools, not bothering to take this kind of personal safety issue seriously enough.

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14:49Well, actually, since we've been talking about ChatGPT and chatbots, the story that I wanted to tell you both about this week is this headline that's very related. Basically, there are members of Parliament in the UK that are now concerned that data centre expansion is affecting and could undermine the UK's ability to meet its climate targets. This is super interesting, and it's connected to the story that you were talking about, Tom, because this data center expansion is specifically happening for developing AI products like ChatGPT and like Gemini. And in general, data centers are, they underpin the modern internet.

15:32They have been around for a long time. Every time, I mean, the fact that we're recording this podcast on the internet, that is enabled by a data center. But AI data centers are of a totally different breed because they are far bigger. They are far more energy intensive. And they therefore are far more carbon intensive. The UK currently has around 500 data centers in the country. they are now already yeah wow yeah already but but again like data centers of all varieties not not just ai data centers but there are now plans to bring in around a hundred more data centers most of which will actually be ai data centers and most of which will actually come online around london oh interesting there was a report that was put together by foxglove which is a tech justice nonprofit and by Global Action Plan, which is a climate nonprofit that looked at just 10 of the largest projects that actually self-report how much emissions they think they will contribute to the UK.

16:43And just those 10 would totally wipe out the amount of emissions reductions that happened in 2025 from many people in the public transitioning to electric vehicles. Wow. And presumably they're also sucking up electricity. They're also using, you know, water, they're using power. You know, it's not just the emissions themselves. There's also the knock-on effect, right? Exactly. So here's where, this is why I was Googling the square footage of Buckingham Palace. So the largest data center that is now being built in the UK, it is a 10 billion pound project that's supported by Blackstone Group. It's being constructed in Blythe.

17:29And the size of this campus, because it's actually multiple buildings, it's 10 different buildings that will make up this AI supercomputing facility, is literally seven times the square footage of Buckingham Palace. So imagine disassembling nearly 800 rooms in Buckingham Palace and laying them on the ground side by side next to each other. That is the size of this AI supercomputing facility. that's not the craziest or the largest data center in the world the largest data centers are currently being constructed in the u.s and open ai which is building this massive stargate facility in abilene texas to train and deploy the next generation of gpt models their campus so not just the buildings but the entire site where they're constructing all this stuff is six times the size of the data center in Blythe.

18:32So we are talking about an area that is literally the size of Central Park. And that is still not the largest. Holy moly. That's a lot. Yeah. And that's still not the largest AI supercomputer. The largest one is being built by Meta in Louisiana. And that one, the campus, is three times the size of the campus for OpenAI. So that is roughly one-fifth the size of Manhattan. Christ, on a bike. I mean, that's insane. That's a lot. If you add up just these three data centers, the three of the largest facilities in the world, the amount of energy that they demand, the power demand, almost matches the average power demand of New York City.

19:21i mean one of the things that i think is really interesting about we're saying here right is i everybody's been hearing about data centers we're like oh yeah data centers is really bad for the environment they use up a lot of water like i don't know if i like that there's like reports that they raise local electricity costs but you're saying they're building them like around london like around major cities like yes and that's fascinating in the uk in particular because this is the world championship nation of nimbyism, the sort of not in my backyard. I would have supposed that, especially around London, I mean, it's a 50-year project trying to build a railway line, right?

20:05How are they getting this through the British regulatory systems, the local councils, and the fact that people will write a letter to their local MP complaining if the next door neighbor's cat is too loud. There's actually like a couple reasons I think this is happening. One is just universal around the world is even though these facilities are so massive, they are weirdly also invisible because they are tucked away in neighborhoods that people usually don't go to or rural parts that people usually don't go to. Like they're near London, they're near these other places, but not actually where people frequent.

20:47And when you drive past them, you wouldn't actually necessarily know that it's a data center because it's just nondescript. I've visited one of these facilities before and they purposely are unmarked because they do not want people showing up at the gates and protesting. The one thing that you can tell if it is a data center is there's like these massive power lines that go get connected to these nondescript warehouses. And the amount of electricity that is being delivered is audible. Like I was walking around this data center and the air. Yeah. The air was crackling because of the sheer volume of electricity being delivered to this one place.

21:32So that's really the only way that you can kind of tell that it's a data center versus just like a white building, another nondescript building. Yeah, exactly. But the other thing in the UK that's been so interesting is in December of last year, the UK government designated data centers as critical infrastructure for national security. And so data centers actually have two different pathways for getting approval for a data center. They can either do what they've always done, which is they go straight to the locality and try to get permission from the location that they want to build it in. Or now they have the other option of just going straight to the national government and getting approval without really telling anyone on the ground where the data center is actually going to be hosted.

22:25And so there's kind of these two different factors, like the invisibility of the data center and the fact that the UK government, which is actually a trend around the world, many governments around the world are trying to figure out how to deregulate the data center construction industry as part of a greater push to win the race, quote unquote, on AI development. Well, let me ask you this, right? Like, how is this actually going to affect like my day to day? One of the craziest impacts that data centers will have, which they have already had, which no one ever talks about, is they actually affect how much housing gets built.

23:14in far West London, there are actually housing projects that had to be suspended because data centers were using up too much energy and the grid could no longer guarantee supplies of electricity to homes. No way. Yeah, so this was a report that came out just at the end of last year from the London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee. Like, they were doing this analysis and they were like, this is bad. Like, if the UK government continues to lean into wanting to expand and build those roughly 100 data centers in the country and they do not adequately plan for this, this will create a really bad housing shortage.

23:54I mean, there already is a housing shortage, especially an affordable housing shortage. And London's not the only place that this has happened. This has happened in other places around the world as well. So that's like one way that your neighborhood could be affected. So like is it creating a lot of jobs? Yeah, I just put it in I just asked chat GPT to justify itself For the construction Are you serious? And jobs was its top one It was saying construction jobs That's funny Hundreds of thousands of temporary jobs Construction workers, engineers Permanent jobs, data center technicians, network engineers And then it says increased tax revenue What you're saying there, Nikki, like temporary jobs, like while we're building the things and then the permanent jobs, from what I've seen, you need a couple of people who know how to work at a data center.

24:46And it's just like a big computer building and it does computer stuff in there and like you make sure it doesn't catch on fire. I mean, it's obviously more complicated than that, but there's not a lot of people. No, there's not. Yeah, these facilities are meant to be highly automated. So the Blythe data center campus, the 10 billion pound one, that's seven times Buckingham Palace, that is generating around 4 ,000 jobs, but only 400 of those will be long term, full time, direct employment at the facility. 400 jobs sounds like nothing to me for a facility of that size. But it's probably, I have to assume they're like shipping people in from somewhere else.

25:22Like, do you have data center experts living in your town? It's actually not local jobs. Yeah, they literally do ship people from other locations and the construction work especially because you don't train the construction workers in the town itself. You literally move the construction workers from the last data center site three towns over to this town now. The economics, the jobs impact is way more complicated than the companies make it out to be. And so there are all of these other ramifications. So there's the price ramifications, the housing ramifications. Like usually people do not think about this when they think about AI, right?

26:03This is like our conception of AI is that it's a digital technology. It's ethereal. It exists in the cloud. it's like supposed to be from this other world and it doesn't have a physical manifestation when in fact the reality is it has the largest physical footprint of pretty much any technology in history like the amount of money that is being poured into building these data centers is beyond far beyond anything that was ever spent to on on the Apollo program to get the first man to the moon, anything that was spent on the interstate highway system in the U.S. Wow. We could put Nikki on the moon for the money that we're spending on this.

26:47We could put all of us on the moon. I mean, come on. That would be pretty big. So what can we do about this? So for anyone who's listening to the podcast, you should first and foremost check if a data center is coming online near you and educate yourself about that project. The next thing that you should do is then call your representative and ask them, demand answers from them and express concerns about the things that you are hearing related to data centers. Ask them what the impacts are going to be in your community. And in the UK, there's actually in a few months going to be a public consultation period for a national policy document on data centers.

27:28So people should keep their eyes peeled on that and actually contribute to this public consultation and put pressure on the UK government to include environmental impacts, utility price impacts and other types of local impacts in that document. I want to talk about Starlink and Iran because it came out in the last couple of days that according to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. smuggled roughly 6 ,000 Starlink terminals, which are the devices that link up with the satellites. Maybe we should say a little bit about what Starlink is here. Yeah, what is Starlink? Starlink is a massive network of low-Earth orbit satellites.

28:10It's one of Elon Musk's companies, and he has been filling the sky with these low earth orbit satellites and they are a way of connecting to the internet from essentially anywhere all you need is one of these terminals it is satellite internet it has been very useful in a lot of situations in places where there is no way of getting internet access via any other way you know in remote remote places so elon musk has applied to launch one million satellites into orbit around the United States. I mean, one side effect of Elon Musk's project here that doesn't get as much attention is like, if you're an astronomer, Starlink is ruining the sky.