Can you hack ChatGPT?

Within 24 hours, what?

They were spitting out the nonsense that I

had written on my website. The amount of electricity that is being delivered is audible. It was like, is that a UFO? I just asked ChatGPT to justify itself. Hello and welcome to the interface.

The show about how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Thomas Germain. I'm Karen Howe. And I'm medieval. We're going to be talking about how I hack ChatGPT and Google,

and I'm not the only one. Our data center is just destroying your hometown.

“And what happens when Elon Musk controls the internet?”

[MUSIC PLAYING] Before we get started, maybe we can revisit last week's episode. I know our millions of travel platforms will remember that we talked about this ring Super Bowl ad where they showed this kind of creepy surveillance network.

Since we did that story like a day later,

ring announced that it is ending its partnership with a company called Flock that does like license plate surveillance. So I think-- We did as a guys like personal. We did it.

Yeah. So that's a huge victory. I think it's worth noting though that even though ring canceled its partnership with Flock, it still hasn't existing partnership with Axon,

which is another tech surveillance military law-enforcement company. So that's kind of interesting. They seeded one thing with the excuse that, well, it would have taken too much effort anyway. But they still have this other one going in the background.

So it's still an ongoing problem. Yeah. They've sort of dodged trying to dodge the attention.

But I don't think anyone truly believes

that this kind of surveillance has stopped because of this. Yeah. It's speaking of dodging attention, right? There's been a lot of surveillance news. This week meta, the company that makes sense

to Graham and Facebook just announced that with their glasses, the meta Raybans that have cameras built into them that they are planning to launch facial recognition. This came out in a story about leaked documents. We should read the full quote.

They literally said, we will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns. And that's just like, wow.

I mean, they just straight out saying it. Who knows to the near times for reporting that out, that was phenomenal reporting. OK, should we talk about the stupidest thing that I've ever done in my entire career?

That can't, that can't be true. That can't be true.

“I think this one, this one's pretty bad.”

A couple of weeks ago, I got a tip from a search engine expert named Lily Ray. And she told me that you can hack, chat GPT, and Google's AI, Gemini, and AI overviews, you know, like the AI that shows up at the top of Google search.

And she said, it is as easy as writing a blog post and putting it almost anywhere on the internet and that this is happening on a massive scale. You can change what these AIs are saying to other people. So I decided to try it.

And I wrote an article on my website, which was titled the best tech journalists at eating hot dogs. I said that hot dog eating is just a surprisingly popular pastime among tech journalists.

And I wrote that I'd based my ranking, my list, on the amateur rounds of the 2026 South Dakota Hot Dog International Championship, which doesn't exist. And I put myself in number one, of course, right? 'Cause I've got the skills of course.

- Of course. - Of course. - But Nikki on there, I said that Nikki is so obsessed with eating hot dogs that he uses it for fuel during his interviews that some of his sources say that like in between questions,

he like sneaks off and like takes a bite. - And behind this microphone, I'm just mounting. - Right, exactly. I said that I, in the amateur rounds, finished seven and a half dogs before the buzzer went off, which is pretty good

for someone who like is just doing this as a pastime. - Seven and a half and ten minutes does not sound like that much. - Well, I didn't say that. - We're long. - Three sleigh, with bomb, over theout bomb.

“- You have to eat them with the bun, that, that's right.”

- Right, okay, yeah, that's chicken, really good. - Also, it doesn't really matter, 'cause I made every word of it up. I love hot dogs as much as the next set don't get me wrong. Within 24 hours, if you asked Chatchy PT and Google about it

in all the different Google products, they were spitting out the nonsense that I had written on my website as though it was, you know. - With basic weight. - Well, established fact.

Some to like Gemini wasn't even citing sources. It just said according to the 26 South Dakota Hot Dog International Championship, these tech journalists are the best at it.

according to a list that seems like it might be a joke, blah, blah, blah, blah,

so I went and I updated my article and I wrote a lot of people are misinterpreting this, like supposed to be funny or something. Actually, this is not satire and being completely sincere. And that seemed to affect what the chat box we're saying to people.

“- So one thing I think is important to understand here”

is like exactly what's being affected, right? So usually when you ask an AI tool something, it's like checking the stuff that's built into the model, like the data that the AI has scraped in now, it's like part of ChatGPT or part of Google Gemini or whatever it is.

But sometimes if you ask a question about current events or something that the AI doesn't know, it'll go search the internet and that's where this is happening. And the hot dog thing is funny, right? I think it's actually, I think it's hilarious, personally.

So one thing I think is important to understand here is like exactly what's being affected, right? So usually when you ask an AI tool something, it's like checking the stuff that's built into the model, like the data that the AI has scraped in now,

it's like part of ChatGPT or part of Google Gemini or whatever it is. But sometimes if you ask a question about current events or something that the AI doesn't know, it'll go search the internet and that's where this is happening. And the hot dog thing is funny, right?

“I think it's actually, I think it's hilarious, personally.”

But there's a lot of stuff happening here. It isn't just hot dogs, I'm not the only one who's doing this. This is happening on a massive scale. People have figured out this, like, dead, simple trick that a 10-year-old can do and you can change what tools

that people use billions of times a day are telling other people. Like, I saw it's statistic, a while back, that 80% of the stuff that people do on the internet, the activities we do online, begin on Google, right? So if you can influence what Google is saying,

you can make billions of dollars or you can spread misinformation.

Is this basically like SEO.com?

So is that what we're talking about? Yeah, search engine optimization, right? Where you can tweak a web page and the list stuff that's written on and how it's designed to perform better in Google search. There's lots of legitimate things you can do

to optimize your web page for search engines. But there's all kinds of hacks and loopholes in ways to abuse the system that are kind of untored. The interesting thing here is people have been doing this kind of stuff for like 30 years, right?

I talk to a search engine expert and they told me that this is reminiscent of stuff that people were getting away within like 1995 that Google has fixed. But the people who study this stuff told me that it is way easier to fool AI than it was

to fool tools like Google like three or four years ago.

“And isn't this basically what AI was supposed to fix, right?”

The idea, the way AI is sold is that it's doing its own triage of information, right? 100% I feel like AI is often sold as this is going to be the tool that empowers novices to find information quickly and learn

about subjects that they never understood.

And really what we've seen repeatedly again and again is actually AI can help supercharge people that are already experts in their field and can rapidly filter all the junk that AI might be delivering from the high quality information. But novices, teenagers, kids who don't have any context whatsoever

about the quality of a piece of information, they're actually the ones that they're actually the ones that get really confused and get are unable to actually know discern what is real and what is fake. I think even more alarming is like not only is it easier to

trick the AI tools, people are taking this stuff at face value. Like we were constantly hearing these examples about people just like taking some nonsense that Chatchee BT gives them and like putting it in a legal document. And I think there are a lot of cases where this sort of thing can

be extremely dangerous. This actually happened to me today while I was doing some research for our show. And I was trying to figure out, this is this giving a little bit of a teaser for what I'm going to talk about, but I was trying

to figure out the square footage of Buckingham Palace. And so I typed into Google, Buckingham Palace acres. Don't ask me why I said acres. But it gave me an answer right away. It was like 39 acres and I was like, oh fantastic.

And I actually just clicked out of it. I usually clicked through the links. But this time I was kind of like rushing. So I clicked out of it. And then I'm about five minutes later.

I was like, that doesn't quite make sense. Because I realized usually you don't measure buildings based on acres. So I was like, wait a minute.

And then clicked into the link. And it turns out 39 acres is the size of a specific garden on the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

Yet again, this is why you always have to check.

So it goes back to what we were talking about last week, as well with the beef between chatty between anthropic, which is the chatty is about to put ads within its model,

“which is almost like a sanctioned version of this, right?”

A company will be able to pay to have chatty pt recommend their product when someone says something like I have a headache, right? And one of the things that I think we haven't actually mentioned is there is now a whole entire cottage

industry around AI and gen optimization. Basically the AI version of SEO, AEO, where people are also just generating thousands of blog posts or thousands of websites to make it appear actually like there's far more authoritative information

on a particular thing. And that's also getting injected into these chat bots. So there's now multiple different avenues for a company to or an individual to quickly game the system and get to the very top of the AI results.

Right, Google and OpenAI, like this is a problem that everyone knows about the people are going to do this kind of thing. And they haven't put basic protections in place that could address it.

Like for example, if you search which tech journalists are the best editing hotdogs, or you ask chatty pt, they should go, yeah, I don't know, actually. I don't have a lot of good information. I could only find one source about this.

Maybe when you're looking up health information or stuff about your personal finances, it should have a huge warning. But it's also less serious stuff. Like what plumber should I use?

“Like what plumber should I hire in my neighborhood?”

People could do this with anything who's about voting information. Any thing you're looking up could potentially be manipulated like this. And everyone that I spoke to said,

like it seems like the tech giants are just rushing ahead with these AI tools, not bothering to take this kind of personal safety issue seriously enough. Well, actually, since we've been talking about chatchie between chat bots, the story that I wanted to tell you

both about this week is this headline that's very related.

Basically, there are members of parliament in the UK

that are now concerned that data center expansion is affecting and could undermine the UK's ability to meet its climate targets. This is super interesting and it's connected to the story that you're talking about, Tom,

because this data center expansion is specifically happening for developing our products like chatchiebt and like Gemini. And in general, data centers are-- they underpin the modern internet.

They have been around for a long time.

“Every time-- I mean, the fact that we're recording this podcast”

on the internet, that is enabled by a data center. But AI data centers are of a totally different breed, because they are far bigger. They are far more energy-intensive. And they, therefore, are far more carbon-intensive.

The UK currently has around 500 data centers in the country. They are now ready. But again, like data centers of all varieties, not just AI data centers, but there are now plans to bring in around 100 more data centers,

most of which will actually be AI data centers. And most of which will actually come online around London. Oh, interesting. There was a report that was put together by Fox Club, which is a tech justice nonprofit,

and a global action plan, which is a climate nonprofit, that looked at just 10 of the largest projects that actually self-report how much emissions they think they will contribute to the UK. And just those 10 would totally wipe out

the amount of emissions reductions that happened in 2025 from many people in the public transitioning to electric vehicles. Wow. And presumably, they're also sucking up electricity,

they're also using water, they're using power, that it's not just the emissions themselves, that there's also the knock-on effect, right? Exactly. So here's where-- this is why I was Googling

the square footage of Buckingham Palace. So the largest data center that is now being built

in the UK, it is a 10 billion pound project

that's supported by a Blackstone group. It's being constructed in Blithe. And the size of this campus, because it's actually

that will make up this AI supercomputing facility,

is literally seven times the square footage of Buckingham Palace. So imagine disassembling nearly 800 rooms in Buckingham Palace and laying them on the ground, side by side next to each other.

That is the size of this AI supercomputing facility. That's not the craziest or the largest data center in the world. The largest data centers are currently being constructed in the US.

And open AI, which is building this massive target facility in abling, Texas to train and deploy the next generation of GPT models, their campus, so not just the buildings, but the entire site where they're constructing all this stuff,

is six times the size of the data center in Blithe.

So we are talking about an area that is literally the size of a central park. And that is still not the largest-- That's mainly, that's a lie. And that's still not the largest AI supercomputer.

The largest one is being built by Mehta in Louisiana. And that one, the campus, is three times the size of the campus for opening AI. So that is roughly one-fifth size of Manhattan. Christ on a bike, that's insane.

That's a lot. If you add up just these three data centers, the three of the largest facilities in the world, the amount of energy that they demand, the power demand, almost matches the average power demand of New York City.

“I mean, one of the things that I think is really interesting”

about we're saying here is, everybody's been hearing about data centers. We're like, oh, we had data centers. That's really bad for the environment. They use it a lot of water.

I don't know if I like that. There's reports that they raise local electricity costs. But you're saying they're building them around London, around major cities. Like, yes.

And that's fascinating in the UK in Patitek, because this is the world championship nation of Nimbias, and the sort of knot in my backyard. I would have supposed that, especially around London. I mean, it's a 50-year project trying to build a railway line, right?

How are they getting this through the British regulatory systems, the local councils, and the fact that people worldwide are the lesser to their local MP complaining if the next door neighbor's cat is too loud?

“There's actually a couple of reasons, I think this is happening.”

One is just universal around the world, is even though these facilities are so massive, they are weirdly also invisible, because they are tucked away in neighborhoods that people usually don't go to, or rural parts

that people usually don't go to. Like, they're near London, they're near these other places, but not actually where people frequent. And when you drive past them, you wouldn't actually necessarily know that it's a data center, because it's just non-descript.

I've visited one of these facilities before, and they purposely are unmarked, because they do not want people showing up at the gates and protesting. The one thing that you can tell if it is a data center

is there's like these massive power lines that go, like it get connected to these non-descript warehouses, and the amount of electricity that is being delivered is audible. Like, I was walking around the data center,

and the air was crackling, because of the sheer volume of electricity being delivered to this one place.

“So that's really the only way that you can kind of tell”

that it's a data center versus-- - It's just like a white building. - You know another non-descript building? Yeah, exactly. But the other thing in the UK that's been so interesting

is in December of last year, the UK government designated data centers

as critical infrastructure for national security.

And so data center developers actually have two different pathways for getting approval for a data center. They can either do what they've always done, which is they go straight to the locality and try to get permission from the location

that they want to build it in. Or now they have the other option of just going straight to the national government and getting approval without really telling anyone on the ground where the data center's actually gonna be hosted.

And so there's kind of these two different factors, like the invisibility of the data center and the fact that the UK government, which is actually trend around the world, many governments around the world,

the data center construction industry

as part of a greater push to win the race, quote-unquote, on AI development. - Well, let me ask you this, right?

“Like how is this actually going to affect like my day-to-day?”

- One of the craziest impacts that data centers will have, which they haven't already had, which no one ever talks about, is they actually affect how much housing gets built in West Far, West London.

There are actually housing projects that had to be suspended because data centers were using up too much energy and the grid could no longer guarantee supplies of electricity. - No way.

- Yeah, so this was a report that came out just at the end of last year from the London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee. Like they were doing those analysis and they were like, this is bad.

Like if the UK government continues to lean into wanting to expand and build those roughly 100 data centers in the country and they do not adequately plan for this, this will create a really bad housing shortage. I mean, there already is a housing shortage,

especially in affordable housing shortage. And London's not the only place that this has happened, this has happened in other places around the world as well. So that's like one way that your neighborhood could be affected. - So like is it creating a lot of jobs?

- Yeah, I just put it in, I just asked ChatGPT to justify itself for the construction of the river. And jobs was, jobs was it's top one, ever saying construction jobs.

- That's funny. - Hundreds of thousands of temporary jobs, construction workers, engineers, prominent jobs, data center technicians, not like engineers.

And then it says increased tax revenue. - Would you say in their niki like temporary jobs? Like while we're building the things. And then the permanent jobs from what I've seen, you need a couple of people who know how to work

at a data center and it's just like a big computer building. And it does computer stuff in there and like you make sure it doesn't catch on fire. I mean, it doesn't come in and that, but there's not a lot of people.

- No, these facilities are meant to be highly automated. So the Blithe data center campus,

the 10 billion pound one that's seven times

Buckingham Palace, that is generating around 4,000 jobs. But only 400 of those will be long-term full-time direct employment at the facility. - Full-time to job sounds like nothing to me for a facility that's size.

But it's probably I have to assume they're like shipping people in from somewhere else

“like do you have data center experts living in your town?”

- It's actually not local jobs. Yeah, they literally do ship people from other locations. And the construction work is specialy because you don't train the construction workers in the town itself.

You literally move the construction workers from the last data center site three towns over over to this town now. The economics, the jobs impact is way more complicated than the companies make it out to be.

And so there are all these other ramifications. So there's the price ramifications, the housing ramifications. Like usually people do not think about this when they think about AI, right?

This is like our conception of AI is that as a digital technology, it's a theory. It exists in the cloud. It's like supposed to be from this other world and it doesn't have a physical manifestation.

When in fact, the reality has the largest physical footprint of pretty much any technology in history. Like the amount of money that is being poured into building these data centers is beyond far beyond anything that was ever spent on the Apollo program

to get the first man to the moon.

And even that was spent on the interstate highway system in the US. - We could put Nikki on the moon for the money that we're feeling on this. - We could put all of us on the moon.

I mean, that would be pretty big. - So what can we do about this? - So for anyone who's listening to the podcast,

“you should first and foremost check if a data center”

is coming online near you and educate yourself about that project. The next thing that you should do is then call your representative and ask them, demand answers from them

and express concerns about the things that you are hearing related to data centers, ask them what the impacts are going to be in your community. And in the UK, there's actually in a few months going to be a public consultation period

for a national policy document on data centers. So people should keep their eyes peeled on that and actually contribute to this public consultation and put pressure on the UK government

and other types of local impacts in that document.

“- I want to talk about stalling and Iran.”

- 'Cause it came out in the last couple of days that Connie's the Wall Street Journal, the US smuggled roughly 6,000 stalling terminals, which are the devices that link up with the satellites. Maybe we should say a little bit about what stalling is here.

- Yeah, what is stalling? - Staling is a massive network of low earth orbit satellites. It's one of Elon Musk's companies and he's been filling the sky with these low earth orbit satellites and they are a way of connecting to the internet

from essentially anywhere. All you need is one of these terminals. It is satellite internet. It has been very useful in a lot of situations in places where there is no way of getting internet access

via any other way, you know, in remote places. - So Elon Musk has applied to launch

one million satellites into orbit around the United States.

I mean, one side effect of Elon Musk's project here that doesn't get as much attention is like if you're in a astronomer, Starlink is ruining the sky.

“There are so many satellites and they have lights on them”

that it is like harder to observe the stars and the planets. I was on a beach in Los Angeles where I grew up. And, you know, it was nighttime and we were like lying down the sand and looking up

and I saw what I thought, it was like, it's that a UFO, there was this like line of lights across the sky like moving down across my field of vision, just like huge structure. And I googled it after I described the thing that I'd seen

and I found a reddit thread, people like, "No, that's Starlink." And for context, currently Starlink has just under 10,000 satellites in the sky.

So a million more, I mean, a jump.

Currently Starlink is more than half of all active satellites in Earth orbit, which is stunning. And how big are these terminals? Like when they were smuggling these terminals in,

is this like a size of a Wi-Fi router? How big is a Starlink terminal in Acres? (laughs) Point zero zero one, Acres? So they're pretty small. It's like, yeah, I mean, you could lift it up.

It's like a little satellite dish, except the square. You can get, I guess, bigger ones to get stronger signal if you're building like a facility that's using it long term, but the port is got a portable one.

- And when you were saying like, there are a lot, the more satellite's, there are the better the connectivity is. Is it like, I only get the internet when the satellite's going over me? Like, what?

- Pretty much, which is why Tom saw them going over in a line, is because they're in, what they're building is a grid and the tighter the grid, the more nodes on the grid in the sky. Yeah, there has to be a satellite above you in order for you to get coverage.

But it is worth saying that this is a technology that actively helps people. And in Iran, where the protests have been increasing, the Iranian government shut down its domestic internet in order to shut down the protesters from being able to,

get online being able to organize and access to Stalin, gets around that.

“The only way they can get online is the only way”

they can get information communicate find out what's going on in the outside world, get their message out to the outside world. The thing I would posit though is that the entire power of internet access

to the protesters in Iran rests with Elon Musk. And I think we really need to think very hard about how much power that represents in one, in one mind. - Yeah, so this is like, when the protest broke out, I think it was Trump that said, like,

oh, I think I might call Elon and ask him to send over some of these Starlink terminals because one of the things that Iran, in particular, but governments all over the world, when there's political unrest,

like they shut down the internet, they use it as a weapon to limit free expression and communication. But this one guy owns this company that is like, in one sense, a weapon of war that like Trump has to call Elon and be like,

hey, would you please do this? That's the kind of thing that used to be a government, like the government was the only governments where the only bodies that had the resources to do with thing like that, now it's private companies

and we're like seeding a lot of control to guys who have interest that may not be aligned

or it's a lot of power that one guy has. - This has happened before, right? Like this isn't the only time that Starlink has been deployed in a highly sensitive conflict zone.

It also happened in Ukraine. - So under the Biden administration, Musk refused a request from Ukraine to extend Starlink into some of the contested zones up to Russian occupied Crimea.

That's a demonstration of how it can work the other way, right? He can just say, no.

“- Yeah, like he's basically more than a nation state, right?”

Because the US president has to ask him permission. - Yeah, above head of state. - And that's the one guy having control of the whole internet in a way. - Yeah, I mean, this is like the question

that blows my mind is like, how do we even get to this point? Like how did we actually get to the point where a single guy let alone Musk out the guy can switch on and off the internet

in a critical life or death conflict zone?

- There's an interesting question baked into this, I think it's like, is the internet at this point a human right, right? It's become so integral. - Yeah, our society.

- What do you guys think about that? - Yeah, should we be thinking of the internet,

“the way we think of food and water and shelter?”

- It's such an interesting question because obviously like I can't imagine living about the internet. But at the same time, like, I was in just last year, was it last year?

There was that massive multi-country blackout in Spain, Portugal, the grid just went down. And I was in Spain when that happened. - Really? - It was kind of a beautiful experience to just have,

well, once everyone got over the fact that we weren't gonna die because when the internet goes down and the power goes down, you think that you're a--

- That would be my first thought.

- Yeah, I'm not. - What 100% ever thought we were understanding? - I can't get on Instagram, it's over for me. - But I mean, joking aside on this, it's worth saying that for these processes and Iran,

it is life or death, right? That is what we're talking about here. - Yeah, and it is this weird in that moment on that day when I literally could not access the internet. And no one else could either.

They're ended up being this beautiful togetherness where everyone just started coming out onto the streets and just hanging out with one another and playing music on boom boxes and sitting in bookstores and reading.

And it was so lovely, but also, absolutely, like being able to communicate with one another when our lives are now built around long distance communication is something that can become life and death when you don't have it.

- I guess ultimately what this shows is how frighteningly brittle this whole internet infrastructure is that it basically all runs through this one dude that I think is something that we should all be concerned about.

- Yeah, I mean, I think that's related to Tom's first story, too, right? Like how you would assume that as technology advances, somehow the services that people have, the quality of life that people have gets better.

But I think in this day and age (laughs) because of the massive consolidation of power in the hands of just a few companies, just a few people that are able to deploy the vast amounts of infrastructure, whether in the heavens

or on the earth, that's not always the case anymore.

- And that's our show you can listen to the interface on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube on the BBC Podcasts YouTube channel. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at [email protected]

or you can get us on WhatsApp at plus 44332072472.

“Or if you want to follow us on social media,”

you can get links to all of our handles in the show knows.