There’s no rogue McDonald’s AI bot, but ‘prompt injection’ is still a risk for companies

People hacking branded AI bots can result in significant reputational, financial, and legal consequences.

There appears to be a recent epidemic of users hijacking companies’ AI-powered customer service bots to turn them into generic AI assistants. The goal is to get the branded bots to do their bidding, without having to subscribe to an AI service. Sometimes, people force the bots to do things that they are not supposed to do, like giving extraordinary product deals and even helping them to take legally problematic actions.