HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

GPT-4o's Chinese Tokens Reportedly Compromised by Spam and Pornography Due to Inadequate Filtering

May 14, 2024

OpenAI's GPT-4o was found to have its Chinese token training data compromised by spam and pornographic phrases due to inadequate data cleaning. Tianle Cai, a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, identified that most of the longest Chinese tokens were irrelevant and inappropriate, primarily originating from spam and pornography websites. The polluted tokens could lead to hallucinations, poor performance, and potential misuse, undermining the chatbot's reliability and safety measures.
Alleged deployer
openai, gpt-4o
Alleged developer
openai
Alleged harmed parties
chinese-speaking-users-of-chatgpt, researchers, openai, openai-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/729

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.