OpenAI said it foiled attempts by the Israeli political campaign firm Stoic to use its ChatGPT AI service to engage in “influence” campaigns with artificially generated content spread around the Internet. This was just one of five firms engaging in such activity around the world, with the others coming from Iran China and two from Russia.
The company dubbed the operation by Stoic “Zero Zeno,” for the founder of the stoic school of philosophy. The people behind Zero Zeno used OpenAI’s models to generate articles and comments that were then posted across multiple platforms, notably Instagram, Facebook, X, and websites associated with this operation.
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To disrupt Zeno Zeno, OpenAI said it banned a cluster of accounts operated from Israel that were being used to generate and edit content for an influence operation that spanned X, Facebook, Instagram, websites, and YouTube. “The network was operated by STOIC, a political campaign management firm in Israel,” alleged OpenAI. This operation targeted audiences in Canada, the United States and Israel with content in English and Hebrew, said OpenAI. In early May, it allegedly began targeting audiences in India with English-language content.
“OpenAI is committed to enforcing policies that prevent abuse and to improving transparency around AI-generated content,” said the company. “That is especially true with respect to detecting and disrupting covert influence operations (IO), which attempt to manipulate public opinion or influence political outcomes without revealing the true identity or intentions of the actors behind them.”
According to the report, many of the social-media accounts that posted this network’s content used profile pictures that “appear to have been created using an earlier type of artificial intelligence: generative adversarial networks (GAN).” Such images can be readily downloaded from the internet. Despite the ease with which these images can be created, we identified multiple social media accounts in this network using the same picture. Sometimes, two or more accounts with the same profile picture would reply to the same social media post.
STOIC was founded in 2017 by a team of experienced political and business strategists who identified the need for an advanced system that can incorporate data analysis, BI models and AI technology all in one place. We at STOIC developed a user-oriented and cost-effective system that can improve the strategy and efficiency of any operation.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research and implementation organization based in the United States. It was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and several others. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all humanity.
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot that was launched by OpenAI in November 2022. Chatbot.com explains that a chatbot is a software that simulates human-like conversations with users via chat. Its key task is to answer user questions with instant messages.
