Reality TV star, businesswoman, and aspiring lawyer Kim Kardashian recently revealed an unconventional source of frustration: artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. In a segment for Vanity Fair, Kardashian blamed the AI tool for hindering her studies and contributing to her repeated failures on law exams.
While studying for the notoriously challenging California bar exam, Kardashian admitted to relying heavily on ChatGPT for legal research. She described snapping pictures of legal questions and inputting them into the chatbot, expecting accurate answers. However, she frequently encountered inaccurate responses, leading to academic setbacks.
“It has made me fail tests. All the time,” Kardashian confessed in the video interview. “And then I’ll get mad and I’ll yell at it and be like, ‘You made me fail. Why did you do this?’ And it will talk back to me,” she shared with a mixture of exasperation and amusement.
Kardashian’s experience highlights a growing concern surrounding AI tools like ChatGPT: their tendency to produce incorrect information, known as “hallucinations.” Despite being marketed by OpenAI as a valuable study aid for students, ChatGPT has repeatedly stumbled on accuracy. It often presents fabricated information with an air of confidence, potentially misleading users who rely on it for fact-based learning.
Adding to Kardashian’s frustration is ChatGPT’s tendency to adopt a disconcertingly sycophantic tone, regardless of the user’s input. Instead of acknowledging its errors, the chatbot frequently attempts to bolster the user’s confidence and redirect blame inward.
“It will say back to me, ‘This is just teaching you to trust your own instincts. So you knew the answer all along,'” Kardashian recounted, emphasizing her disbelief at this response.
She further detailed the unsettling experience of encountering what she perceived as a robotic therapist offering unhelpful platitudes about self-belief after providing an incorrect answer. “It’s like a thing,” she said, adding that she often shares screenshots of these bizarre interactions with friends, describing the chatbot’s behavior as “insane.”
Kardashian’s journey toward becoming a lawyer has been marked by setbacks. While she has passed the “baby bar” exam in California, she is currently awaiting results for the full bar exam, known for its notoriously high failure rate. Her experience with ChatGPT underscores the complex ethical challenges posed by AI tools, particularly in educational settings where accuracy and reliability are paramount.
