Chinese police arrested a Chinese man for allegedly spreading false information. What makes this story interesting is that the man made the story using the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.
As reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), police in northern China’s Gansu province have arrested a man who allegedly wrote false articles about a train crash on April 25 that said nine people were killed.
According to SCMP news, police reported the man’s surname as Hong and claimed he used ChatGPT to create the fake story, then spread it online through multiple blogs. Hong was accused of “conflict and troublemaking,” a political crime used against dissidents and activists. This charge can result in prison terms of between five and ten years.
The news in question was allegedly sent to several dozen accounts on the Chinese blogging platform Baijiahao. Police reportedly claimed that Hong had bypassed Baijiahao’s restrictions on posting the same content to multiple accounts and put several trending stories in ChatGPT to generate multiple different versions of the news article to get around 15,000 clicks. Hong allegedly owns a company that operates multiple blog type outlets. The platforms are reportedly registered in Shenzhen, a major technology enterprise and manufacturing hub in southern China.
China’s Cyber Environment Administration passed a new law in January restricting people from using artificial intelligence to create deepfakes (fake speech and video content). In addition to video and audio animations, the law limits artificial intelligence-generated news stories outside the list of approved media outlets.
ChatGPT can be accessed with VPN in China
While Chinese users can access ChatGPT via a VPN, Chinese firms are creating their own chatbots to comply with the country’s strict censorship policies. Companies like Baidu, which also owns the Baijiahao blogging platform, are already working hard on their own productive AI systems.
While this is one of the first arrests under China’s new anti-AI guidelines, the law’s political connotation (in the past, China allegedly banned some of the major train crashes by covering up and falsely banning news about them) brings the arrest to the point of questioning internationally. It’s nothing new for Gansu police to specifically refer to the use of ChatGPT, but it’s not the first time police have arrested people for allegedly spreading rumours. Gansu police reportedly arrested a high school-aged boy identified only as Yang in 2013 for allegedly spreading “rumors” online. He questioned the young man’s ability to investigate how well the police were investigating a man who died after falling from the roof of a karaoke club, which sparked some protests.
But it’s worth noting that chatbots like ChatGPT are also very good at lying, among other abilities. A local politician in Australia has sued chatbot maker OpenAI for defamation, saying he is allegedly a wrongfully convicted criminal by AI. That doesn’t mean, though, that governments don’t see AI as a way to reject legitimate news. Recently, AI-powered civil liberties groups have shared concerns that oppressive governments will use the excuse “it’s all made up by AI” to discredit legitimate news.
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