Like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, OpenAI offers online chatbots and other ai tools that can write social media posts, generate photorealistic images, and write computer programs. In its report, the company said its tools had been used in influence campaigns that researchers had tracked for years, including a Russian campaign called Doppelganger and a Chinese campaign called Spamouflage.
The Doppelganger campaign used OpenAI's technology to generate anti-Ukraine comments that were posted on x in English, French, German, Italian and Polish, OpenAI said. The company's tools were also used to translate and edit articles supporting Russia in the Ukraine war into English and French, and to convert anti-Ukraine news articles into facebook posts.
OpenAI tools were also used in a previously unknown Russian campaign targeting people in Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic States and the United States, primarily through the Telegram messaging service, the company said. The campaign used ai to generate commentary in Russian and English about the war in Ukraine, as well as the political situation in Moldova and American politics. The effort also used OpenAI tools to debug computer code that was apparently designed to automatically post information to Telegram.
The political comments received few responses and likes, OpenAI said. The efforts were also sometimes unsophisticated. At one point, the campaign posted text that had obviously been generated by ai: “As an ai language model, I am here to help and provide the desired feedback,” one post read. At other times, he posted in poor English, leading OpenAI to rate the effort as “Bad Grammar.”
Spamouflage, which has long been attributed to China, used OpenAI technology to debug code, seek advice on how to analyze social media and research current events, OpenAI said. Its tools were also used to generate social media posts that disparaged people who had criticized the Chinese government.
