Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT was back up after an outage affected thousands of users, the company said on Friday.
TakeAway Points:
- Chatbot ChatGPT was back up after an outage that affected thousands of users.
- According to a blog post by OpenAI on Friday, the business believes that over 250,000 requests to create images of the 2024 U.S. presidential candidates were denied by ChatGPT in the run-up to Election Day.
- According to OpenAI, among the requests that were denied were those for image generation featuring President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota.
- Concerns have been raised over the potential impact of generative artificial intelligence on the spread of false information during the many elections that will be held globally in 2024.
ChatGPT is back
“Issues with ChatGPT have now been resolved,” OpenAI said in a statement on its website.
Access was restored to most users by 4:34 p.m. PT (0034 GMT on Saturday), OpenAI said, adding that a small number of customers faced issues until 5 p.m. (0100 GMT on Saturday).
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that ChatGPT had been down for 30 minutes, adding a frown emoji and saying, “We are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but clearly more work in front of us.”
Outage tracking website Downdetector.com said ChatGPT’s services were down for about half an hour, affecting over 19,403 users as of 7:13 p.m. ET (0013 GMT on Saturday).
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, it has attracted 250 million weekly active users. OpenAI’s valuation has jumped to $157 billion from $14 billion in 2021 as revenues climbed to $3.6 billion from zero, far exceeding Altman’s projections at the time.
ChatGPT rejects about 250,000 image generations of presidential candidates before Election Day
OpenAI estimates that ChatGPT rejected more than 250,000 requests to generate images of the 2024 U.S. presidential candidates in the lead up to Election Day, the company said in a blog on Friday.
The rejections included image-generation requests involving President-elect Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Vice President-elect JD Vance, OpenAI said.
The rise of generative artificial intelligence has led to concerns about how misinformation created using the technology could affect the numerous elections taking place around the world in 2024.
The number of deepfakes has increased 900% year over year, according to data from Clarity, a machine learning firm. Some included videos that were created or paid for by Russians seeking to disrupt the U.S. elections, U.S. intelligence officials say.
OpenAI fights deceptive networks
In a 54-page October report, OpenAI said it had disrupted “more than 20 operations and deceptive networks from around the world that attempted to use our models.” The threats ranged from AI-generated website articles to social media posts by fake accounts, the company wrote. None of the election-related operations were able to attract “viral engagement,” the report noted.
In its Friday blog, OpenAI said it hadn’t seen any evidence that covert operations aiming to influence the outcome of the U.S. election using the company’s products were able to successfully go viral or build “sustained audiences.”
Lawmakers have been particularly concerned about misinformation in the age of generative AI, which took off in late 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT. Large language models are still new and routinely spit out inaccurate and unreliable information.
“Voters categorically should not look to AI chatbots for information about voting or the election — there are far too many concerns about accuracy and completeness,” Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, said last week.
