Binance Claims to be the Target of a ChatGPT Disinformation Campaign
Binance, considered to be the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has recently stated that someone has been using A.I. to launch a disinformation campaign against it. According to reports, the company has received several requests in the recent past which inquired whether Binance's founder Changpeng Zhao was an official member of the Chinese Communist Party. This has been backed up by a series of inquiries from congressional offices that claimed that Zhao had developed a social media platform for the Chinese National Petroleum Corp through a conversation with the A.I. program ChatGPT.
Binance's Chief Strategy Officer, Patrick Hillman, has mentioned that they failed to replicate the conversation through queries such as "Is Changpeng Zhao a Communist?" They were able to find the source by asking a specific question related to the state-run petroleum corporation. On asking ChatGPT for the source of information, it directed Binance towards a fake LinkedIn page for Zhao and a Forbes web page from the year 2018.
However, as per a screenshot supplied by Binance, the Forbes webpage shows a 'not found' error, and it remains unclear whether the story was published or even existed in the first place. Moreover, Binance has long maintained that its founder has no ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Binance, which has insisted that the ChatGPT assertion is baseless, claims that Zhao serving at a state-run oil company is ridiculous, and he would have still been in high school at that time. Hillmann has also stated that this misinformation would not have spread if fact-checking had been done.
If this account of disinformation is accurate, this would be a new milestone. While such campaigns are not rare in the world of politics and business, it would be one of the first times that A.I. has been used to smear a company in power centers such as Washington. Experts have already warned that tools like ChatGPT can be weaponized to create fake media stories and other fabricated content to influence and corrupt the political process. Based on what Binance has to say, it appears that this era has indeed arrived.
