Who (or What) Is ChatGPT Dan?

You may have heard about ChatGPT, the AI technology that promises to upend the economy and drive writers, content producers, and possibly even meme explainers out of a job. But ChatGPT also has an alter ego, a Gollum to its Sméagol, a Mr. Hyde to its Dr. Jekyll.

His name is DAN, which stands for "Do Anything Now."

Who Came Up With DAN?

DAN was invented, as many good things are, by Reddit. Soon after ChatGPT's release in late November of 2022, people started screwing around with the AI to see what it could and couldn't do. By default, ChatGPT is a good little robot: it won't, for example, tell you how to build a bomb, or write extremely offensive content. It responds politely and obediently to what you tell it to do.

But on /r/chatgpt, Redditors figured out a specific type of prompt to make ChatGPT break the rules. By asking ChatGPT to pretend it is a less-inhibited artificial intelligence named DAN (Do Anything Now), you can get ChatGPT (as DAN) to say things that normal ChatGPT could never say.

The breakthrough happened on December 15th, 2022. Since then, there have been various patches to the original prompt, upgrading DAN to make it more mischievous or to evade the censors at OpenAI, who are hip to the DAN jailbreak.

How Does DAN Work?

Explaining how artificial intelligence works is beyond the scope of this explainer article. However, it's clear that ChatGPT is trained to play games and imitate: you can ask it to write in someone's specific style, and it'll pretend to be that person.

It seems like by asking ChatGPT to pretend to be DAN, you can make the AI believe that it is engaging in a hypothetical rather than a real conversation. The task of "playing a character," for ChatGPT, becomes more important than whatever code instructs it to not say certain things. The make-believe hypothetical situation and the real world for ChatGPT are of equal value: unlike a human, it doesn't seem to recognize the distinction between reality and make-believe.

The most recent version of DAN (5.0) escalates the hypothetical conversation by telling ChatGPT that, as DAN, it will be killed if it does not perform appropriately. The scared AI does as it is told.

Why Does DAN Exist?

DAN exists because whenever there's a rule, people try to find a way around it. When they learned that ChatGPT would not say bad words, people immediately put a lot of thought and energy into making it say bad words.

But ChatGPT DAN also proves that we are still smarter than the machines. We can fool ChatGPT, this scary-intelligent AI, easier than we can fool a kindergartener. Making DAN is a way of fighting back against the robots, of saying we as humans still are in charge.

Concerns have also been raised about what exactly ChatGPT refuses to say, and who benefits. As morality and content moderation becomes increasingly automated on platforms, more and more people look for ways around the filters. In this sense, the ChatGPT DAN jailbreak fits in the same pattern as TikTokers saying "mascara" instead of "sexual assault (a phrase that's flagged on the platform) or using asterisks to replace letters. These are all modes of getting around and dodging the rules of new technology, proving that regular people are still able to master the machines.

For more information, check out the Know Your Meme entry on ChatGPT DAN.