OpenAI said it has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts allegedly originating from Russia that allegedly used AI generated social media posts to promote Russia’s interests on various platforms including a content website.
According to a statement released by OpenAI on Wednesday, the company had disrupted “covert influence operations (IO) and deceptive attempts to manipulate public opinion or influence political outcomes.
The ChatGPT users originating from Russia had used the LLM to generate social media posts for X, Telegram, LinkedIn, Substack among others to promote articles from a website named ‘International Burke Institute’. OpenAI said that the ChatGPT accounts were being used via virtual private network (VPN) since the LLMs services are not available in Russia.
“The operators prompted in Russian to generate social media comments that were posted on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. Most of the comments they generated were in English, and the operators instructed ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that they were Russian. Much of the generated content was to promote a self-described “expert community” called the International Burke Institute (IBI),” read a statement from OpenAI.
The AI company alleged that while the content on International Burke Institute’s website was not generated using ChatGPT, its articles were heavily plagiarized from other sources on the internet. The underlying themes of the articles were always pro-Russia and attacked US, France, Germany, Ukraine and their allies.
“While the actors only used ChatGPT to produce isolated promotional posts, those posts pointed to an otherwise credible-appearing institution, complete with purported experts, republished academic work and a purported proprietary risk index. This illustrates how influence actors can use AI as a supporting tool within a broader effort to manufacture authority, obscure the source of favored narratives, and establish assets that could be scaled over time,” read statement from OpenAI.
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