Chinese police have arrested a man accused of using the artificial intelligence (AI) bot ChatGPT to create fake news and spread it online. Authorities in Gansu province accused the man, surnamed Hong, of “concocting false and untruthful information” after one of his articles came to the attention of the police cyber division. The article claimed that nine people had died in a local train accident on April 25, although no similar accident had occurred on that date. The posts containing this information had already accumulated more than 15,000 views on the Chinese online platform Baijiahao, where they had been posted simultaneously by more than 20 accounts.
Investigators traced the authorship of the article and discovered that Hong had introduced elements of the most popular stories on Chinese social networks into ChatGPT to quickly generate different versions of the same fake story and upload them to several Baijiahao accounts he had previously acquired. Police have charged Hong with the crime of “provoking disputes and trouble,” which carries a maximum penalty of five years. In some cases considered particularly serious, this penalty can be increased to 10 years, as well as additional penalties, according to Chinese law. Hong’s arrest could be the country’s first related to the use of a bot to create fake news.
In January, China introduced regulations to regulate the use of deep-fake technology, including deep learning and augmented reality, to generate text, images, audio, and video and to create virtual scenarios. This is the first time China has announced a detention related to these regulations.
Saturday, September 7, 2024