Kim Kardashian was asked about her AI use in a new video from Vanity Fair published this week. And the reality TV star blamed OpenAI’s ChatGPT for giving her the wrong answers while studying for tests.
Kardashian has been pursuing a law career through non-traditional means since 2019 and took what’s called the “baby bar” in 2021. She earned her law degree in May and took the bar exam in July, though she’s still awaiting the results, according to Entertainment Weekly.
The actress talked about her use of ChatGPT during a Vanity Fair YouTube video—part of a series where celebrities answer questions while hooked up to a lie detector. Teyana Taylor, star of the recent film One Battle After Another, asked Kardashian questions like whether she considers AI a friend.
“No. I use it for legal advice,” Kardashian said. “So when I am needing to know the answer to a question, I’ll take a picture and snap it and like put it in there.”
Taylor jokingly asked whether she was cheating and Kardashian clarified that it was just to study for her tests, but it often gave the wrong answer. “They’re always wrong,” Kardashian said, stone-faced. “It has made me fail tests all the time. And then I’ll get mad and I’ll like yell at it and be like, ‘You made me fail, why did you do this?’”
Kardashian then said that “she,” referring to ChatGPT, will “talk back to me.” Kardashian said that she tells the robot that it will make her fail, asking it how that makes “her” feel.
“And then it’ll say back to me, ‘This is just teaching you to trust your own instincts. You knew the answer all along,’” Kardashian explained.
Generative AI is notorious for giving bullshit answers because the technology fundamentally doesn’t understand what it’s saying. The responses are perhaps best compared to a magic trick that sounds like it’s capable of reasoning and logic, but it’s really just guessing at the most statistically likely word to put in front of the other. It’s a neat magic trick, but a magic trick just the same. And it’s the reason that AI chatbots struggle with seemingly simple questions like how many R’s are in the word strawberry.
But Kardashian’s response about trying to guilt ChatGPT about giving the wrong answer speak to what’s going on under the hood with all of these AI chatbot. That glimpse at a reassuring voice trying to encourage the user to trust their own instincts is yet another part of the magic trick. ChatGPT’s o4 was notorious for being overly supportive of the user in an almost disturbing way. The upgrade to version 5 was troubling for many users who found o4 to be just what they needed in their lives.
Kardashian and Taylor are both promoting a new show on Hulu called All’s Fair that debuts Tuesday. It’s apparently one of the worst reviewed TV shows in existence, with a Metacritic score of just 18 out of 100.
