Anyone whose phone number is just one digit off from a popular restaurant or community resource has long borne the burden of either screening or redirecting misdials. But now, AI chatbots could exacerbate this inconvenience by accidentally giving out private numbers when users ask for businesses’ contact information.
Apparently, the AI helper that Meta created for WhatsApp may even be trained to tell white lies when users try to correct the dissemination of WhatsApp user numbers.
According to The Guardian, a record shop worker in the United Kingdom, Barry Smethurst, was attempting to ask WhatsApp’s AI helper for a contact number for TransPennine Express after his morning train never showed up.
Instead of feeding up the train services helpline, the AI assistant “confidently” shared a private WhatsApp phone number that a property industry executive, James Gray, had posted to his website.
Disturbed, Smethurst asked the chatbot why it shared Gray’s number, prompting the chatbot to admit “it shouldn’t have shared it,” then deflect from further inquiries by suggesting, “Let’s focus on finding the right info for your TransPennine Express query!”
But Smethurst didn’t let the chatbot off the hook so easily. He prodded the AI helper to provide a better explanation. At that point, the chatbot promised to “strive to do better in the future” and admit when it didn’t know how to answer a query, first explaining that it came up with the phone number “based on patterns” but then claiming that the number it had generated was “fictional” and not “associated with anyone.”
