Describing the Disruption of Malicious Use of AI: A Blog Post
Welcome to Memetic Warfare. This week has some big news, namely Open AI’s latest report, available here. Memetic Warfare is a reader-supported publication.
As an aside, the report covers multiple areas, only some of which we’ll discuss here. This report is especially exciting as it refers to work published by myself and Max Lesser at the FDD and on Memetic Warfare.
Iran Section
The Iran section focused on one cluster of activity under the much-discussed IUVM, leading to 5 ChatGPT accounts being banned. Open AI’s unique vantage point shows technical indicators of combined use of ChatGPT for both operations, enabling them to attribute both IUVM and Storm-2035 (the cluster targeting the US elections) to the same actor.
One of the more interesting domains, al-Sarira, used ChatGPT to generate tweets. Open AI corroborated our work, showing that the domains Critique Politique and La Linea Roja were also tied to the same operators.
Chinese Activity
The report's opening section on Chinese activity titled “Peer Review” discussed a cluster of ChatGPT accounts doing China-related activities, such as monitoring dissident groups and translating documents. They even created “promotional material” for an AI-powered social media listening tool.
This social listening tool, the Qianyue Overseas Public Opinion AI Assistant, was meant to monitor social media platforms to inform embassies and intelligence agencies. There’s no evidence of this platform ever being developed, but it’s reflective of past Chinese activity in the space.
Other Sections
There are multiple other sections of the report on scams, use of ChatGPT by North Korean cyber operators, election interference in Ghana, and more. Interested readers should check those out.
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