For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pior Lewis in for Rachel Feltman. AI is everywhere. It's in your phones, in your internet searches, in defense software,

and it's expanding. The big tech giants, alphabet, Microsoft, meta, and Amazon are planning

on spending nearly $700 billion this year alone on building out AI infrastructure.

And yet, even as companies pour tremendous time and energy into AI,

there remain concerns about the safety and efficacy of such technologies.

There have been several lawsuits alleging suicides linked to AI chatbots.

And more recently, Thomas Germain, a tech reporter at the BBC,

conducted a personal experiment into how an invested individual or business can get chat GPT

and Google searches AI overview to spread lies. We talked to Thomas to find out just how easy it is to

hack these common AI tools and what the consequences of that could be.

Hi, Thomas. Thanks for taking the time to join us today. Thanks for having me on.

So my understanding is you hacked chat GPT? That's right. So I got a tip a couple of weeks ago

that manipulating the things that AI tools like chat GPT or Google

Gemini or the little AI overview at the top of Google search, apparently manipulating the

things that they say to other people can be as easy as publishing an article on your own website, like a blog post.

Apparently people are doing this across the whole internet.

So I decided to test out if it was actually that easy.

So I wrote an article on my personal website, doesn't get a ton of traffic.

I wrote an article that the title was the best tech journalists at eating hot dogs. And I said, competitive

hot dog eating is very popular among technology journalists. And according to the results of a recent

contest in South Dakota, these guys are the best. I put myself at number one, of course.

Modesty. Well, you know, you know me, right?

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