OpenAI said on Friday that it had discovered and disrupted an Iranian influence campaign that used the company’s generative artificial intelligence technologies to spread misinformation online, including content related to the US presidential election.

The San Francisco AI company said it had banned several accounts linked to the campaign from its online services. The Iranian effort, OpenAI added, did not seem to reach a sizable audience.

“The operation doesn’t appear to have benefited from meaningfully increased audience engagement because of the use of AI,” said Ben Nimmo, a principal investigator for OpenAI who has spent years tracking covert influence campaigns from positions at companies including OpenAI and Meta. “We did not see signs that it was getting substantial engagement from real people at all.”

The popularity of generative AI like OpenAI’s online chatbot, ChatGPT, has raised questions about how such technologies might contribute to online disinformation, especially in a year when there are major elections across the globe.

In May, OpenAI released a first-of-its-kind report showing that it had identified and disrupted five other online campaigns that used its technologies to deceptively manipulate public opinion and influence geopolitics. Those efforts were run by state actors and private companies in Russia, China and Israel as well as Iran.

These covert operations used OpenAI’s technology to generate social media posts, translate and edit articles, write headlines and debug computer programmes, typically to win support for political campaigns or to swing public opinion in geopolitical conflicts.

This week, OpenAI identified several ChatGPT accounts that were using its chatbot to generate text and images for a covert Iranian campaign that the company called Storm-2035.

The company said the campaign had used ChatGPT to generate content related to a variety of topics, including commentary on candidates in the US presidential election.

In some cases, the commentary seemed progressive. In other cases, it seemed conservative. It also dealt with hot-button topics ranging from the war in Gaza to Scottish independence.

New York Times News Service