UK Parcel Delivery Company Disables AI After Poetic Bot Goes Rogue

‘There was once a chatbot named DPD, Who was useless at providing help,’ it said to a frustrated customer.

A DPD employee in Bedfordshire, England, on Nov. 7, 2023. Michael Leckie/PA Wire

LONDON—A parcel delivery firm in Britain has disabled the artificial intelligence (AI) function in its online chat systems after a frustrated user coaxed the system into composing a poem about how bad the company’s customer service was.

“There was once a chatbot named DPD, Who [sic] was useless at providing help,” the AI chatbot wrote after Ashley Beauchamp gave up trying to get it to share a phone number for customer services and asked it to write a poem about bad chatbot service instead.