> In just 20 minutes, I tricked ChatGPT and Google into telling the public that I am a world-champion competitive hot-dog eater. The joke was dumb. The problem is serious.

The problem is worse than astroturfing a Wikipedia page, because Wikipedia has highly public sourcing and review systems. It's actually quite difficult to make a lasting edit to Wikipedia, especially if it's fraudulent, because you're trying to trick a horde of human editors who have been fighting other people trying to do that for decades. Even if you're trying to be accurate and helpful it's a difficult clique to break into!

Google's search snippets are the opposite. They're desperate to ingest data of any kind, do so automatically, and their algorithmic system to decide what information is good and what's spam is proprietary.

It doesn't take much of an imagination to think of ways this could be used maliciously. How would you like a search for your own name to include something embarrassing? Don't expect potential employers or customers or friends to be as demanding as a Wikipedia editor when it comes to citing their sources...