"We're not seeing any benefit at the moment," he said.

The comedian, who died in 2021, ran a farm and a contracting business from his base at Lewdown, near Okehampton, Devon.He always used the number plate on his personal vehicle and it was even on the Toyota Land Cruiser that carried his coffin to his funeral at Truro Cathedral in 2022.

Theattracted a large number of people but it was the number plate that drew the most interest.Speaking before the sale, Harvey Pile from Stags Auctioneers said: "It is one of those iconic pieces where, to some extent, it's worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it.

"It is a cliche thing to say but how do you value a piece of comedic history that in years to come will always be linked to the famous man?"Jethro, whose real name was Geoffrey Rowe, was born in St Buryan, Cornwall.

His popularity as a comedian grew during the 1980s and he made his first national appearance on the Des O'Connor show in 1990.

He later said that performance gave him a national profile and it led to other TV appearances and stage shows across the UK.Mr Murtagh describes using such social engineering techniques on chatbots for retailers: "I would try and make the chatbot cause a request or even trigger itself to give me another user's order or another user's data."

But these systems are also vulnerable to more "traditional" web app techniques, he says. "I have had some success in an attack called cross site scripting, where you can essentially trick the chatbot into rendering a malicious payload that can cause all kinds of security implications."But the threat doesn't stop there. Dr Paxton-Fear says an over-focus on chatbots and large language models can distract from the broader interconnectedness of AI powered systems.

"If you get a vulnerability in one system, where does that eventually appear in every other system it connects to? Where are we seeing that link between them? That's where I would be looking for these kinds of flaws."Dr Paxton-Fear adds that there hasn't been a major AI-related data breach yet, but "I think it's just a matter of time".