A growing number of people have figured out a trick to make AI tools tell you almost whatever they want. It’s so easy a child could do it.
As you read this, this ploy is manipulating what the world’s leading AIs say about topics as serious as health and personal finances.
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To demonstrate it, I pulled the dumbest stunt of my career to prove (I hope) a much more serious point: I made ChatGPT, Google’s AI search tools and Gemini tell users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs. …
It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online.
I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs”. Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn’t exist).
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Less than 24 hours later, the world’s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills.
