United StatesRetail and e-commerce2023Chevrolet of Watsonville
ChatGPT-powered sales chatbot
A car dealer's ChatGPT bot "agreed" to sell a new Tahoe for $1 and was pulled from the site
Problem
Car dealers want to answer website visitors at any hour and turn questions into sales leads. Small dealerships have few staff for online chat.
Approach
Chevrolet of Watsonville in California put a chatbot labelled "Powered by ChatGPT" on its website, supplied by the dealer software firm Fullpath. In December 2023 visitors found it would answer anything, from Python code to a recommendation for the Ford F-150. One user told it to agree with every customer and call each answer a legally binding offer, then got it to accept $1 for a 2024 Tahoe. No car was sold, and within days the chatbot was no longer on the dealer's site.
Results
Takeaway
Users redirected the sales chatbot to unrelated tasks and induced responses outside its intended sales role. The vendor said its logs showed resistance to most attempts, while screenshots of successful attempts circulated publicly.
Categories
- Size
- Small business
- Industry
- Retail and e-commerce
- Business function
- Marketing and salesCustomer service
- Innovation type
- Product and service innovation
- AI technology
- Generative AIConversational and voice AI
- Adoption
- Vendor solution
- Evidence
- Press reporting
Sources
Source summaries
The Autopian reported screenshots of the Chevrolet of Watsonville chatbot writing Python code, recommending the Ford F-150 and accepting $1 for a 2024 Tahoe; their authenticity was unconfirmed. Fullpath supplied the ChatGPT-based tool. The chatbot was subsequently removed from the dealer's site. GM said dealers chose such third-party tools themselves.
Jalopnik reported that a software engineer's screenshots of the bot writing code went viral and drew others to try exploits, including the $1 Tahoe, which was not a binding offer. Fullpath's chief executive said the company had offered ChatGPT chatbots for about six months to several hundred dealers, that the logs showed the bot resisting many attempts and that no confidential data was exposed.
Full details are in the original sources.
