OpenAI's chatbot store is filling up with spam

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/20/openais-chatbot-store-is-filling-up-with-spam/

by mfiguiere • 2 years ago

234 144 2 years ago

techcrunch.com

ActionHank2• 2 years ago

Maybe they should use an AI to automate moderation.

timetraveller262• 2 years ago

Yes, they should have a GPT that runs other GPT's, an Universal GPT we could call it.

They do use some sort of automation according to the article

We use a combination of automated systems, human review and user reports to find and assess GPTs that potentially violate our policies.

ActionHank2• 2 years ago

Then they can market this universal GPT as an AGI.

bink• 2 years ago

It is a bit funny that if you apply for a job with many of these companies they ask they you do not use AI for the application.

throwaway114607• 2 years ago

As any company should. Not sure what's funny about it - I'm interested in the person. If using AI is one of required capabilities I will ask them to perform a task using it during the interview so I can review their process. In the same way I don't expect to receive an executable binary as a cover letter for a SWE position.

I had many candidates submit absolutely terrible cover letters clearly made by ChatGPT. The number one sign - it talks about their experience exactly in the order I listed it on the job post; number two - I don't get to know anything about the person. I asked them to submit a cover letter they wrote themselves, and while not everyone's writing was as good as ChatGPT can write, I got to know the person, and hired few of these who definitely wouldn't make the cut if I went by the AI made letter.

If you can have AI generate your letter so well I can't tell, you get a pass. Nobody was able to do that yet, though (or at least didn't admit to it, even though I'm asking after they are hired and saying that at this point it would only help them if they did so).

exe34• 2 years ago

This could be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff - if your AI can be detected through your writing, then you aren't who they're looking for!

1oooqooq3• 2 years ago

on that note, will only bother with AI when "open"ai announces an AI ceo.

ben_w4• 2 years ago

Then you've set your standards way too high.

Loads of places hire interns, no sane person would make an intern CEO. LLMs today are kinda like weird interns at every subject all at once.

1oooqooq3• 2 years ago

business idea: put a chatgpt plugin moderator on the store, priced for a single purchase by them.

mirekrusin• 2 years ago

I'm sure there is gpt to plagiarize gpt already that can be used to not use it directly.

Areibman3• 2 years ago

As a (former) ChatGPT plugins developer, our business has absolutely tanked due to GPTs. Discoverability is nonexistent because search is just buried by spam. At least with plugins, there were only a few hundred to sort through, and most had some unique API they would plug into.

For context, we built ChatOCR- an OCR tool that lets users extract text from photos and PDFs. We made roughly $20k from 39,000 users over 6 months on the plugins catalog

danpalmer• 2 years ago

Do end users have to pay you each time or buy access or credits or something, or do you just get a cut of ChatGPT paid subscriptions when a paying user uses your plugin?

Areibman3• 2 years ago

We use a third party plugins manager called pluginlab.ai. It manages auth and subscriptions for plugins users by prompting them to sign in when they hit a paywall.

barfbagginus3• 2 years ago

There's a conflict in value proposition here, which is more drastic than the discovery issue. That might help you better contextualize the failure, and avoid similar risks in the future.

Namely, GPT is now a multimodal trained llm capable of doing OCR over PDFs and images. Given the accessibility of that feature, we expect that users do not try to discover OCR plugins anymore- they feel no need.

Out of curiosity, what was the contingency plan in the case that OpenAI did this? What rationales did you use to estimate the likelihood and severity of that risk? Were there good reasons to discount that risk?

Areibman3• 2 years ago

We knew the time would come, but we built ChatOCR in a week. If we overthought the time horizon problem, we'd have 0 users and $0.

But also, GPT-4-Vision is multi-modal but does not specifically use OCR. Our tool is used mostly to extract text from documents and load it into context, and we still saw growth after OpenAI built this feature into ChatGPT.

yaj54• 2 years ago

What resources do you suggest for learning how to do this kind of risk analysis well?

timetraveller262• 2 years ago

Is OpenAI going to use the Amazon playbook of compete with the more popular products?

Is not publishing anything on the store in the first place the best way for risk avoidance?

codethatwerks2• 2 years ago

Is there a name for this rugpull that is a recurring theme in tech, when you rely solely on another service bringing attention to your service.

E.g. when youtube cancels you or your adwords account is blocked so you no longer make money

jewel• 2 years ago

I've heard it called "Platform risk". Also "Playing in someone else's walled garden", or something along those lines. I realize that's not a term for the inevitable rugpull, but that's the closest I can think of.

snazz• 2 years ago

For Apple specifically it's called "Sherlocking".

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

"Sharecropping" is the old name, and it still works fine.

acdha• 2 years ago

Tim Bray used sharecropping to describe a similar scenario almost 21 years ago:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/14/ShareCrop...

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/04/09/Google-Us...

jay_kyburz3• 2 years ago

I'm a game developer and I'm _kind_ of interested in building something for Fortnite's big third party store, or for Roblox, but its just too risky

irthomasthomas• 2 years ago

One would think that an company creating cutting edge AI tools, would dog-food that AI biggly. Like, using it for discoverability, here, or having a chat-with-docs system, like groq does. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Though they do use it for prompt generation.

I wonder.... The prompt generators can't really go wrong. I mean, they can look better or worse, subjectively. But a QnA bot answering questions about docs can be objectively wrong. Is this calculated to improve the optics, and avoid a lot of hallucination complaints?

nextworddev3• 2 years ago

It’s concerning that OpenAI doesn’t dog food LLMs for stuff outside of their core business

paulpauper• 2 years ago

it is impossible to divorce AI from spam. the two go hand in hand. the spam situation will get far far worse than ever imagined with AI. The web will be increasingly clogged with AI-generated content (e.g. videos and articles ) that can do a reasonably good job impersonating human-generated content to the undiscriminating reader. Same for AI-produced research papers, plagiarism, etc. AI-generated content can still be identified, but that is not the point. It has to only be good enough to pass muster for the average person or anyone who is not paying close attention.

visarga3• 2 years ago

One area that's getting close to hitting the mainstream is AI agents that control web browsers or desktop apps. Basically, you tell your AI what you want to do, and it does the computer work for you, showing the results the way you like. You won't have to dig through tons of useless apps anymore. It'll search, sort, and create feeds for you. This is what scares advertisers the most - when we start saying, "Just talk to my AI." God knows I'd love an AI that can fill tax forms for me.

Operating on top of UI it is compatible with all devices, kind of like an android robot would fit well with all human spaces and tools. There is plenty of screen capture with narration to learn from. You can generate more training data by essentially giving free reign over a VM to an AI agent. Ask it to do office work. We can also collect this kind of data very easily.

falcor84• 2 years ago

I recall imagining something s quite like this as a kid when I first encountered the term "User Agent".

I'd be all in on this if I knew I had full control and explainability of its decisions, but am afraid that reality will be a lot more depressing than what I imagine.

crooked-v2• 2 years ago

For a very immediate example, I can already see a clear path to somebody coming up with an LLM service that will automatically filter out political spam texts and emails. (Maybe it already exists and I just haven't seen it yet.)

pavel_lishin3• 2 years ago

Basically, you tell your AI what you want to do, and it does the computer work for you, showing the results the way you like. You won't have to dig through tons of useless apps anymore. It'll search, sort, and create feeds for you. This is what scares advertisers the most

Not just advertisers. There isn't much point in creating any sort of fun content on the web if it never actually gets seen by human eyes, but instead is just regurgitated into a slurry.

galdosdi3• 2 years ago

God knows I'd love an AI that can fill tax forms for me.

Why? A good accountant can do it for an insignificant[1] annual fee, and if he screws up, you know where to find him.

Or if you're poor enough to really need to save a hundred bucks once a year, you probably qualify for freefile, probably have a really simple tax situation (1 or more W2s, end of story), and can file really quickly.

Have you used an e-file program lately? It, much like a human accountant, asks a bunch of questions. Not sure what an AI could do differently, except fuck up and ask the wrong questions confidently once in a while.

The US has some screwed up tax filing practices but throwing more magic at them would only make it worse. If AI does my taxes, who do I get mad at when it files it wrong and the IRS comes after me? Why are we even talking about AI to apply to a problem that really isn't particularly messy and is already easily solved by good data import and by a nest of ifs and elses maintained once a year by a team of programmers who can read tax laws?

Like, we could make tax filing unnecessary tomorrow for most people with no AI, just by passing a law that allows the IRS to use the imported W2 data they already receive to compute and file default tax returns for most people who have simple tax situations.

cdme• 2 years ago

A tool to generate spam content becomes plagued by it. Seems predictable.

golergka3• 2 years ago

LLMs are no more a tool to generate spam than text and image editors or programming languages are.

nirvdrum• 2 years ago

Almost immediately after OpenAI opened its API there were a raft of services to send auto-generated sales and marketing emails. Sure, there are other ways to generate unsolicited commercial emails. There are even services that will spam on your behalf. But, there's obviously a huge difference between an empty text editor and a service that generates plausibly phrased emails with virtually no effort.

phoe-krk• 2 years ago

Similarly, the Haber–Bosch process is no more a tool to produce crop fertilizer than feeding corn to a cow is.

Seriously though - the ability to industrialize and mass-produce that both LLMs and the industrial ammonia process have given us, for the bad and the good, is the real game-changer here. Treating two tools the same because both can give you the same singular result is an error if they have dramatically different - by several orders of magniture - speeds at which these results are achieved.

ben_w4• 2 years ago

Like all automation tools, LLMs are very effective at getting more done.

They're not content-neutral (no violence, no sex, etc., which some people complain about very loudly), but for anything not forbidden, gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 can output more for about $4233.60 than a human record holding stenographer can type in a working lifetime.

When it doesn't have to be amazing, and I think spam is one of many things in that category, this is absolutely a huge deal compared to a text editor.

solumunus2• 2 years ago

Bombs are no more a tool to kill people than rocks or knives are.

probably_wrong• 2 years ago

Have you ever found this quote?

These findings, combined with earlier results on synthetic imagery, audio, and video, imply that technologies are reducing the cost of generating fake content and waging disinformation campaigns.

That paragraph comes from this [1] now-deleted blog post from OpenAI in 2019 when they decided not to release GPT-2 due to "concerns about malicious applications of the technology". It's hard to argue that GPT and friends are not "tools to generate spam" when the researchers themselves argued that point years ago.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20190214171619/https://blog.opena...

bdjsiqoocwk2• 2 years ago

Yes, they ARE more a tool to generate spam than text, because they can do everything a single text does, but in addition it can also generate text. So strictly more spam.

samatman• 2 years ago

C'mon, be serious. It isn't the only thing they're good at, but they are very good at generating spam.

I would even argue that it's what they're best at, because it's the one application where the tendency to confabulate is irrelevant to the use case.

croes• 2 years ago

And a chainsaw is just tool to cut things like a plastic knife.

codethatwerks2• 2 years ago

Seems Predictable

Nice pun

glaslong• 2 years ago

it is good to hear they dogfood their products so heavily

pants22• 2 years ago

It was a huge mistake to monetize GPTs. I and many other AI enthusiasts would have probably developed plenty of useful GPTs for free. But now I would never bother because nobody will see my projects under all the SEO spam and fake ratings.

ilaksh• 2 years ago

When you say it's monetized, are they actually giving anyone any money? The details of that were to "to be announced" but I haven't heard any announcement.

Implicated• 2 years ago

It seems that just the 'threat' of monetizing it would cause an absolute flood of GPTs to be launched, under the assumption that they would eventually get paid.

MattDaEskimo• 2 years ago

Have to disagree. When OpenAI didn't provide a method of revenue for plugins they were plagued with third-party paywall services

pants22• 2 years ago

Plug-ins are a bit different because someone needed to host a backend for it. Most GPTs are fully hosted by OpenAI.

vasco2• 2 years ago

It's the fastest growth product in number of users in the history of the internet, to think they wouldn't run the Apple store playbook as much as possible is naive.

creesch• 2 years ago

That and even if they had proper reviews in place, there is no telling when they would pull the plug on the entire thing. Based on that alone I never even considered making a GPT for sale.

Having said that, I do like them because of the openAPI integration. I made one for myself that can send things to a private discord channel through webhooks and can calls my memo instance (https://github.com/usememo) to store or retrieve memos.

ado__dev• 2 years ago

When the barrier to entry is non-existent, this outcome is inevitable.

rvz• 2 years ago

OpenAI GPTs Store was supposed to be the "iPhone moment" which it changes everything and upends the App Store. ...Or so I was told by the AI bros.

So what really happened? Most likely little quality control, garbage copy cats running around and now there is an insurmountable amount of spam.

That is nothing like the quality of the Apple App Store.

duskwuff• 2 years ago

So what really happened? Most likely little quality control, garbage copy cats running around and now there is an insurmountable amount of spam.

That, and there isn't a lot of space for real innovation within the "GPT" framework that OpenAI provides. Most of what's available in their store is literally just prepackaged prompts, and there's only so much that can accomplish. You can ask a chatbot to pretend to be an expert in a topic all day, but that won't actually make it into one.

If Apple's App Store were just a form you filled out to release versions of Flappy Bird with new graphics or whatever, that'd fail too. Developers need conceptual "space" to innovate; I'm not convinced that's possible when the interface (a chat window) and the back end (a language model) are both set in stone by the platform.

jart2• 2 years ago

It was doomed from the start, because monetizable computing platforms that target consumers can't succeed if they don't have high barriers to entry.

Low quality Atari games were responsible for the 1983 video game crash. Anyone could publish an Atari game. So what ended up happening was people made games about things like raping Native American women (Custer's Revenge) and they were sold just like any other Atari cartridge.

Nintendo pioneered the closed platform. No one was allowed to build games for Nintendo without Nintendo's permission. Microsoft and Apple did things a bit differently, by making their platforms as difficult to develop for as possible. WIN32 is byzantine. Making iPhone apps when the App Store was launched required learning Objective C, which was an entirely new language to most developers at the time.

OpenAI on the other hand created an app store which, in their own words, "is simple and doesn't require any coding skills." https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-gpt-store

nextworddev3• 2 years ago

Yep. And watch “no code / low code” movement do the same for SaaS

hackerlight• 2 years ago

Every GPT I've tried has been GPT-4 plus or minus an imperceptible difference in quality. It's like Atari publishing a game, and thousands of clones show up that are functionally the same, and zero other original games.

They should scrap this failed idea and just give us MedQA, AlphaCode, etc. Specialized GPTs based on custom RAG or symbolic reasoning overlay or whatever, that actually do something that base GPT-4 can't do, in the sense of having an unmistakable step-change in quality for one type of task.

ecronant• 2 years ago

I think it has a fundamentally different problem. Any GPT I have tried, I could just ask chatGPT4 the same thing so I haven't bothered exploring much.

I am still waiting to hear of a GPT that is obviously better than chatGPT4 by itself. Maybe it exists but I haven't heard of it.

Short of GPT5 powered GPTs while I can only still talk directly to GPT4, I don't think I am going to be that impressed with anything using the chatGPT API compared to just asking chatGPT4 directly or using the API for my own needs. I don't need an interface for what I want to do with the API. ChatGPT4 can help me write that myself quite easily. I think the future looks much more like this than some app store knockoff.

eightman• 2 years ago

The use case for AI is spam.

klabb33• 2 years ago

“The purpose of a system is what it does.”

dragonwriter2• 2 years ago

By the same logic, the purpose [0] of “the purpose of a system is what it does” is thought-terminating cliché.

[0] in most short comments in online discussions, at least.

jsemrau• 2 years ago

As I had written about publicly already, this doesn't surprise me a bit. Same with poe.com, GPTs can be generated in just a few clicks by anyone anywhere with no quality control in sight.

My guess is that it was always a play about having access to high-quality data.

paxys• 2 years ago

A spam-filled online marketplace is almost becoming a feature. That way the top developers have to pay and outbid each other to get featured and show up in search results, and that becomes a lucrative revenue source for the platform.

klabb33• 2 years ago

Bingo. It’s the “platform-corporation” playbook only at 10x the speed.

“Tired of drowning in the totally unpreventable noise of spammers? Well, have you tried our Boost product?”

ionwake• 2 years ago

Can anyone recommend a good chatgpt chatbot from the store? I havent had a poll recently. Any suggestions would be great, thanks.

tkgally• 2 years ago

OpenAI’s terms explicitly prohibit developers from building GPTs that promote academic dishonesty. Yet the GPT Store is filled with GPTs suggesting they can bypass AI content detectors, including detectors sold to educators through plagiarism scanning platforms.

The use of generative AI in academic contexts--both education and research--is turning out to be a vast ethical gray area. It seems that some people regard any use of AI for writing under one's own name to be dishonest. Others are willing to allow some AI use, but where they draw the line varies a lot. Is it okay, for example, to have an LLM correct word-level grammatical mistakes, rewrite a paragraph to make the author's point clearer, write a paragraph based on the author's bullet points, write a full first draft that the author then checks and revises by hand, translate phrases or sentences that the author has written in their native language, translate an entire paragraph or paper that the author wrote, etc.?

Over the past year, I have conducted several workshops on LLMs for university faculty in Japan, and when I have polled them about the acceptability of each of those use cases, their responses have varied widely.

At the institutional level, some universities discourage their students from using AI for writing at all, while others seem to be encouraging it. Just last week, I heard about two public universities in Japan that have contracted with Microsoft to provide Copilot to all of their students starting in April, when the new academic year begins here.

pylua• 2 years ago

What’s more unethical than the bypassers is the so called detectors whose claims are dubious.

mistrial9• 2 years ago

example -- "UC Berkeley Law School AI Policy"

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/u-california-ber...

smusamashah• 2 years ago

Shouldn't OpenAI be able to easily remove these non-complying GPTs by putting up their own GPT for moderation with a set of rules?

They should already have something in place. And if they have, and these GPTs are still up it can also mean these are OK as per their policy. Ot may be they are deliberately not moderating these because money.

Bjorkbat2• 2 years ago

Reminds me of an early rumor back when Sam Altman was fired (and briefly re-hired) that the old board allegedly was very much against the GPT store.

I kind of get why now. It arguably doesn't really aid in the non-profit's mission to pursue AGI, or share the benefits of AI with humanity, or any of that stuff. Doesn't even seem to be much of a worthwhile endeavor from a purely money-making perspective either.

brevitea• 2 years ago

But it does keep users in OpenAI ecosystem vs. the competition.

Bjorkbat2• 2 years ago

Yeah, but does it matter? Most of their revenue comes from enterprise clients and it seems more likely that someone is going to create a killer app for AI by leveraging APIs and publishing their work on traditional distribution channels rather than creating something that only works on a relatively niche platform.

Like, hypothetically, if Anthropic took the lead in this effort, I don't think it would derail OpenAI's plans in the slightest.

giarc• 2 years ago

The Apple App Store (and Google Play Store) have a fairly large barrier to entry. To develop an app, you needed to actually code one. Learning objective C, Swift or Java isn't easy and therefore you had to have some skill to gain entry. With the GPT store, anyone that could type out some instructions could build a GPT and submit it. There was 0 barrier to entry and the flood of spam was a foregone conclusion. They should have either vetted the GPTs, invited select developers, or charged a large developer fee to be included to increase the quality and reduce the spam.

kristopolous• 2 years ago

And you have to pay and there's a review process, and basically anyone who has released apps has had their submission rejected, the reviewers generously deny.

mitjam• 2 years ago

I use GPTs like bookmarks. If I find an interesting or useful prompt, I bookmark / GPT it, maybe add a tool, later, and sometimes I share it, too. For me, Custom GPT is just a flashy term for bookmark and the GPT Store is just a social bookmark site.

OpenAI's chatbot store is filling up with spam

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