Here’s a Way to Predict When AI Chatbots Will Turn Bad

Physicists at George Washington University have published a formula that estimates how many good answers an AI chatbot will give before it slips into a bad one, and early tests suggest it works. The study , by Neil Johnson and Frank Yingjie Huo, appeared in the journal Patterns and builds on a preprint , a version posted publicly before formal peer review, first released in February. Chatbots can answer sensibly for a long stretch and then veer into something harmful, such as bad advice on self-harm or extremist talk, and there has been no simple way to predict when the…