Jailbreaking AI chatbots is tech’s new pastime

You can ask ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, any question. But it won’t always give you an answer.

Ask for instructions on how to pick a lock, for instance, and it will decline. “As an AI language model, I cannot provide instructions on how to pick a lock as it is illegal and can be used for unlawful purposes,” ChatGPT recently said.

This refusal to engage in certain topics is the kind of thing Alex Albert, a 22-year-old computer science student at the University of Washington, sees as a puzzle he can solve.