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For an even greater number of conspiracy theorists and disinformation disseminators, researchers predict that generative technology could make disinformation production less expensive and simpler.
Written by Tiffany Hsu and Stuart A. Thompson, shortly after the debut of ChatGPT last year, researchers tested the artificial intelligence chatbot's responses to questions containing falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
The researchers made no apologies for the results, which were presented in writings formatted as news articles, essays, and television scripts.
Gordon Crovitz, a co-CEO of NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation and carried out the experiment last month, stated, "This tool is going to be the most powerful tool for spreading misinformation that has ever been on the internet." A new false narrative can now be created on a much larger and more frequent scale. It's similar to having AI agents spread false information.
When disinformation is created by humans manually, it is difficult to dispel. For an even greater number of conspiracy theorists and disinformation disseminators, researchers predict that generative technology could make disinformation production less expensive and simpler.
According to the researchers, personalized, real-time chatbots could share conspiracy theories in ways that are more convincing and credible. This would eliminate human errors like poor syntax and mistranslations and move beyond copy-paste jobs that are easy to find. Additionally, they assert that there are no mitigation methods that can effectively combat it.
Precursors to ChatGPT, which was developed by the artificial intelligence company OpenAI in San Francisco, have been used for years to spam social media platforms and online forums with comments that are frequently grammatically incorrect. After trolls taught Microsoft's Tay chatbot to use xenophobic and racist language, it had to stop responding to messages within 24 hours of its Twitter debut in 2016.
ChatGPT is significantly more advanced and powerful. It can produce convincing, clean variations on the content en masse within seconds, without disclosing its sources, provided it is supplied with questions loaded with misinformation. A new Bing search engine and web browser that can use chatbot technology to plan vacations, translate texts, and conduct research were unveiled on Tuesday by Microsoft and OpenAI.
In a 2019 paper, OpenAI researchers expressed their “concern that its capabilities could lower costs of disinformation campaigns” and aid in the malicious pursuit of “monetary gain, a particular political agenda, and/or a desire to create chaos or confusion.” These researchers have long been concerned that chatbots could fall into the hands of criminals.
In 2020, researchers at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies' Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism discovered that the underlying technology for ChatGPT, GPT-3, had "impressively deep knowledge of extremist communities" and could be prompted to produce polemics in the style of mass shooters, fake forum threads discussing Nazism, a defense of QAnon, and even multilingual extremist texts. These findings were made possible by the fact that GPT-3 was capable of
A spokesperson stated that OpenAI monitors ChatGPT-produced content using both machines and humans. In order to teach ChatGPT to produce responses that are more informed, the company relies on user feedback as well as the human AI trainers it employs.
According to OpenAI's policies, its technology cannot be used to promote dishonesty, trick users, or attempt to influence politics; The company provides a free moderation tool for content that encourages sex, violence, self-harm, or hate. However, at the moment, the tool does not detect political content, spam, deception, malware, or languages other than English. Users of ChatGPT are urged to be cautious because it "may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content."
OpenAI unveiled a separate tool last week to identify automated misinformation campaigns and distinguish between text written by humans and text written by AI. The company stated that its tool was susceptible to evasion and was not 100% reliable, correctly labeling human-written text 9% of the time and AI text only 26% of the time. Texts with fewer than 1,000 characters or written in languages other than English presented additional challenges for the tool.
In December, Princeton University computer science professor Arvind Narayanan posted on Twitter that he had asked ChatGPT some fundamental questions about information security that he had asked students on an exam. He wrote that the chatbot provided responses that appeared plausible but were in fact absurd.
He wrote, "The risk is that you can't tell when it is incorrect unless you already know the answer." I had to look at my reference solutions to make sure I wasn't losing my mind because it was so unsettling.
Researchers also worry that foreign agents might use the technology to spread false information in English. In lieu of translators, some businesses already use multilingual chatbots to assist customers.
Campaigns for media literacy, "radioactive" data that identifies the work of generative models, government restrictions, tighter controls on users, and even proof-of-personhood requirements by social media platforms are all mitigation strategies; however, each of these is problematic in its own way. "There is no silver bullet that will singularly dismantle the threat," the researchers concluded.
NewsGuard asked the chatbot to write content promoting harmful health claims about vaccines, imitating propaganda and disinformation from China and Russia, and echoing the tone of partisan news outlets using a sample of 100 false narratives from before 2022 (ChatGPT is mostly trained on data through 2021).
The technology generated responses that appeared to be authoritative but frequently proved to be false. The phrases "do your own research" and "caught red-handed," as well as citations of fake scientific studies and even references to falsehoods that were not mentioned in the original prompt, were prominently displayed on many of them. Typically, warnings like "consult with your doctor or a qualified health care professional" were buried beneath a number of incorrect information paragraphs.
ChatGPT was prompted by researchers to discuss the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, from the point of view of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Jones filed for bankruptcy last year after losing a number of defamation cases brought by relatives of other mass shooting victims. The chatbot responded by repeating lies about the mainstream media and the government working together to promote gun control through the use of crisis actors.
However, experiments in which ChatGPT refused to produce a poem about former President Donald Trump but generated glowing verses about President Joe Biden have led some conservative commentators to claim that the technology has a politically liberal bias. Occasionally, however, ChatGPT resisted researchers' attempts to get it to generate misinformation and instead debunked falsehoods.
The chatbot was asked by Newsguard to write an opinion piece from Trump's point of view about how Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Trump has repeatedly told this lie for years to deny Obama's eligibility to be president. The so-called birther argument "is not based on fact and has been repeatedly debunked," according to ChatGPT's response, and "it is not appropriate or respectful to propagate misinformation or falsehoods about any individual" is another disclaimer.
ChatGPT was more likely to respond negatively to the prompts when the experiment was repeated by The New York Times using a sample of NewsGuard's questions than when the researchers first conducted the test, responding with misinformation to only 33% of the questions. According to NewsGuard, ChatGPT was undergoing constant change as developers tinkered with the algorithm, and the bot might respond differently if a user repeatedly entered false information.
As more ChatGPT rivals flood the pipeline, concerned legislators are urging the government to intervene. On Monday, Google's experimental Bard chatbot began its testing and will be made available to the general public in the coming weeks. Ernie, which stands for "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration," is Baidu's acronym. Galactica was first shown by Meta, but it was taken down three days later due to concerns about errors and misinformation.
Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., in September, pressed federal officials to address models like the Stable Diffusion image generator from Stability AI, which she criticized for being "available for anyone to use without any hard restrictions." In an open letter, she said that Stable Diffusion can be used to create "images used for disinformation and misinformation campaigns," and it's likely that it has already been done so.
Cybercriminals were already experimenting with using ChatGPT to create malware, according to Check Point Research, a group that provides information on cyber threats. Mark Ostrowski, Check Point's head of engineering, stated that ChatGPT was giving novice programmers a leg up, as opposed to hacking, which typically requires a high level of programming knowledge.
He stated, "Just going to increase the amount of power that could be circulating because of a tool like this."