OpenAI on Friday said it banned a set of accounts linked to what it said was an Iranian covert influence operation that leveraged ChatGPT to generate content that, among other things, focused on the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
"This week we identified and took down a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that were generating content for a covert Iranian influence operation identified as Storm-2035," OpenAI said . "The operation used ChatGPT to generate content focused on a number of topics — including commentary on candidates on both sides in the U.S.
presidential election – which it then shared via social media accounts and websites." The artificial intelligence (AI) company said the content did not achieve any meaningful engagement, with a majority of the social media posts receiving negligible to no likes, shares, and comments. It further noted it had found little evidence that the long-form articles created using ChatGPT were shared on social media platforms.
The articles catered to U.S. politics and global events, and were published on five different websites that posed as progressive and conservative news outlets, indicating an attempt to target people on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
OpenAI said its ChatGPT tool was used to create comments in English and Spanish, which were then posted on a dozen accounts on X and one on Instagram. Some of these comments were generated by asking its AI models to rewrite comments posted by other social media users. "The o.