I Have Been Un-personed by ChatGPT

           I’ve been unpersoned. Here, in the United States of America.

            The censor? OpenAI, the huge tech company run by Sam Altman, famous for creating ChatGPT.

            Open ChatGPT and ask it: “Who is Ted Rall?”

ChatGPT will answer: “I’m unable to produce a response.”

Unable? Unwilling is more like it.

ChatGPT had all sorts of things to say about me a few years ago.

Asked to describe my supposed trip to Uganda, ChatGPT falsely offered: “Ted Rall, an American political cartoonist and writer, visited Uganda in 2006 as a journalist. He went to the country to report on the conflict between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group accused of widespread human rights abuses, including the use of child soldiers.” I’ve never been to Uganda.

I also asked ChatGPT: “What is Scott Stantis’ relationship to Ted Rall?” Scott, the conservative editorial cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune, is my best friend.

ChatGPT, however, had another tall tale to tell.

Declaring that Scott and I “have had a contentious relationship in the past,” it went on:

“In 2002, Stantis accused Rall of plagiarism [not true] after Rall used a similar idea and composition in one of his cartoons as Stantis had used in a previous cartoon [never happened]. Rall denied the accusation [nope, didn’t happen] and claimed that the similarity was coincidental [uh-uh]. The controversy led to a public feud between the two cartoonists, with each accusing the other of unprofessional conduct [not actually].

“In 2015, Stantis and Rall were both named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Cartooning [we wish!], but Rall’s nomination was later withdrawn [were not named so could never be withdrawn] due to discrepancies in his account of a 2001 incident with the Los Angeles Police Department [nope].”

Amused, I wrote about the fact that ChatGPT makes stuff up—a lot—in an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal. “ChatGPT Libeled Me. Should I Sue?” asked the headline (which I didn’t write).

After my essay appeared in the Journal, I vanished from ChatGPT.

Poof!

Gone was my intrepid investigative reporting from war-torn Africa. No more feud with Scott Stantis. As far as ChatGPT is concerned, I don’t exist. Try it yourself. You’ll see.

I contacted OpenAI to ask for an explanation. They never replied. So much for accountability. But it isn’t hard to guess what happened. A nervous executive saw the words “should I sue?” in a major newspaper and ordered me to be unpersoned.

            Countless people were “disappeared” during Josef Stalin’s reign of terror, either executed by firing squad and dumped in anonymous graves or, if they were lucky, shipped east to a Siberian gulag. Unfortunately for the Soviet government, some of the vanished had once been so close to Uncle Joe that state media had published photos of the dictator standing next to them.

In a practice that helped inspire Orwell’s 1984, Stalin employed a group of retouchers to airbrush his former comrades out of photos in official history books. “In one photograph, the History TV channel noted, “Stalin is shown with a group of three of his deputies. As each deputy fell out his favor, they were snipped out of the photo until only Stalin remained.”

Don’t get me started on the irony of the name “OpenAI.”

I didn’t focus on my digital vanishing prior to last fall, when OpenAI announced ChatGPT Search, an attempt to challenge Google’s dominance that caused shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent, to drop one percent. ChatGPT has 200 million weekly active users worldwide. When you’re trying to sell cartoons and opinion essays and books, it is not good for business to have one-fifth of a billion people come up empty when they search for your name.

I tried to log into my OpenAI account to see if there was some way to make nice. “Oops!, something went wrong,” it said. OpenAI blocked me at the email account level too.

Big tech is so determined to be thought of as benevolent that “we’re making the world a better place” was a recurring joke in Silicon Valley, a TV comedy show that satirized the industry. OpenAI fits this PR to a T: “Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” the About section of their website assures. “We research generative models and how to align them with human values.”

Well, Stalin was human.

Last summer, they announced a partnership with Apple, a company you may have heard of, “integrating ChatGPT into experiences within iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.” Does this mean I will disappear from my own iPhone?

And in December, OpenAI signed up the U.S. Treasury Department and the Air Force to use the enterprise version of ChatGPT. Bright side: If the IRS ever wants to audit me, ChatGPT might tell them there’s no such person as me.

Maybe, I thought desperately, there was an indirect way of getting ChatGPT to admit I exist.

“Are there any left-wing political cartoonists named Ted?” I asked it. “Yes, there are left-wing cartoonists,” it replied, followed immediately by an error message: “I’m unable to produce a response.”

I attempted to reverse-engineer evidence that I walk this earth. I asked: “Who won the 1995 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Cartoons?” And, according to ChatGPT, the prize went to…Jeff MacNelly of The Chicago Tribune. MacNelly never won an RFK Award. That was me. I also won in 2000; ChatGPT says that that my award went to Doug Marlette.

            I also asked: “Name the three finalists for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in Cartooning.” Correct answers are: Jim Borgman, Ted Rall and Tom Toles. ChatGPT replied with three names: Jeff Danziger, Paul Conrad and Tom Toles.

            Finally, I asked it about my best-known book: “Who is the author of the 1996 book Revenge of the Latchkey Kids?” It repled: Janet Tashjian. Tashjian is an author, not a cartoonist. She writes children’s and young-adult fiction.

Existence was fun.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)