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Using ChatGPT to fire guns: what could possibly go wrong?

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans
Published in
3 min readJan 12, 2025
IMAGE: A Terminator shooting a machine gun
IMAGE: Grok

Albert Einstein is credited with (rightly or wrongly) noting that “two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.”

And where stupidity resides, danger is never far away: take STS 3D, an engineer who works on robotics, automation and 3D printing, who demonstrates in a blackly comic video how he has mounted a rifle on a support allowing three-dimensional movement and then connected it to ChatGPT’s real-time API so that it can be given orders on where and when to fire. The invention is capable of tracking a fast-moving target and executing commands such as “ChatGPT, we are under attack from the front left and front right, respond accordingly,” which the assault rifle then does, with blanks.

A bit of harmless fun? YouTube is awash with videos of flamethrowers and automatic rifles fitted to robot dogs, but STS 3D seems to be the first genius to explore ChatGPT’s potential for violence, and in response OpenAI has closed his account, citing a violation of its terms of service, which prohibit the use of its services to develop or use weapons or to automate certain systems that may affect personal safety. In any event, he hasn’t succeeded entirely in connecting his device up to ChatGPT, because there’s a lapse of a couple of seconds before commands are processed. And besides, given…

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Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Published in Enrique Dans

On the effects of technology and innovation on people, companies and society (writing in Spanish at enriquedans.com since 2003)

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Written by Enrique Dans

Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger (in English here and in Spanish at enriquedans.com)

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