What Really Happened When Fullpath’s ChatGPT Chatbot Went Viral

We took a bold step in the car world by creating Fullpath’s ChatGPT integration for car dealers, aiming to make car shopping chats awesome for shoppers – quick, helpful, and all about the customer. It has been great to see it take off, handling thousands of daily chats and boosting car sales and service inquiries. What that success didn’t do is make us famous…until last weekend.

You may have heard that our GPT chatbot went viral over the weekend (including an Elon Musk comment) when some enterprising folks gamed it to do silly things like write a poem, do a python script, repeat after them to price a car at a dollar (hence, our big disclaimers) and, of course, er, recommend a Tesla.

Here are the facts behind the funny meme:

• There were hundreds of attempts to hack the chat, all of which failed – the system performed exactly as designed;

• There were 3,000 attempts to get the chat to say silly things, 99% of which failed and were repelled;
  
• NONE of this behavior was shopper normal – in fact the opposite, see my next point;
  
• All month every month our chatbot facilitates hundreds of sales leads and service leads, and does it wonderfully , with super high conversion rate and shopper satisfaction. Real shoppers don’t do this stuff;
  
• We have now put in measures to head this stuff off in the future and shut down any further such attempts.

While getting a chatbot to do silly tricks is still a nice internet story, we all know chatbots are here to stay, and are going to be facts of life for all of us. This was actually a very successful example of innovative technology, our chatbot, standing up against folks who wanted to deliberately game it in a way a shopper never would. Believe me – taking videos of old world chatbots and human chat doing silly things has been done by us and others, it just doesn’t make news.

I think dealers are focused on the future, and on using innovation. The dealers using our ChatGPT are innovation leaders. They know the future.  These dealers are pushing the envelope in innovation, and we’ll own that every day of the week as their partners.

You can try our ChatGPT here, and in honor of the viral traffic, you can nab a totally free 30-day trial until December 31, 2023.