Chinese police have arrested a man for allegedly generate hoaxes about a train accident and spread them on the Internet. The peculiarity of this arrest is that he was using the ChatGPT artificial intelligence to deliberately create false information and be able to post it to multiple accounts making it appear that many people have reported this false incident.
The idea is that using ChatGPT would have allowed you to create multiple ways to report a fake event and make it look like the information came from more people. This would be considered the first arrest in China for misuse of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT has been used to generate misinformation in China
Police in China's Gansu province said in a statement on Sunday that they had arrested a suspect surnamed Hong for "use artificial intelligence technology to concoct false and untrue information«. It caught the attention of the police cyber division when they spotted a fake news article claiming that nine people had died in a local train accident on April 25.
Cybersecurity officers from Kongtong County discovered that the article had been simultaneously posted by more than 20 accounts on Baijiahao. This is a blogging platform managed by the baidu search engine. The article had received more than 15.000 clicks when it came to the attention of the authorities.
The Gansu Public Security Department stated that Hong was suspected of a crime of "pick a fight and cause trouble", which carries a maximum sentence of five years. In cases considered particularly serious, they can carry up to 10 years in prison and additional penalties. Police said they had traced the origins of the item to a company owned by the suspect Hong, who operated personal media platforms registered in Shenzhen. About 10 days later, a police team searched Hong's home, his computer, and arrested him.
Hong confessed to bypassing Baijiahao's duplicate checking feature to post to various accounts he had acquired. He introduced into ChatGPT the elements of social stories that had been trending in China in recent years to quickly produce different versions of the same false story and uploaded them to their Baijiahao accounts.
Source: Gadgets 360
