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Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

openai.com

11–20 of 155 posts

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#11
post #9

What they don't say on their post but that we can guess and is from interest is that they probably had to spy their user messages to determinate that they used the account for generate content for the influence operation. For sure the purpose is noble, but it is good to remind everyone that everything you type, submit or generate there is not private but could be randomly snooped by strangers!

Naah, probably they used OpenAI apis to read, summarize and categorize everything

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#12
post #9

What they don't say on their post but that we can guess and is from interest is that they probably had to spy their user messages to determinate that they used the account for generate content for the influence operation. For sure the purpose is noble, but it is good to remind everyone that everything you type, submit or generate there is not private but could be randomly snooped by strangers!

[deleted]

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#13

Yeah. Knowing my tools are judging my political positions and could self destruct if the authors disagree just makes me love using my computer. This is why I only use local models these days. EDIT: Out of posts for today but I've been pretty happy with Gemma2. The context is short but the performance is very good and it's easy to disable refusal.

Just curious, which local models?

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#14

I wonder if it would be possible to get a list of countries that can have influence operations using ChatGPT and countries that can't.

> Russia, China, Iran, and Israel https://www.npr.org/2024/05/30/g-s1-1670/openai-influence-op...

This doesn’t pass the sniff test. Each of these countries has domestically developed, strong LLMs. And even if they did not, they’d have absolutely no issue running the larger FOSS ones. You don’t need GPT4 to generate political drivel.

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#16

I wonder if it would be possible to get a list of countries that can have influence operations using ChatGPT and countries that can't.

> Russia, China, Iran, and Israel https://www.npr.org/2024/05/30/g-s1-1670/openai-influence-op...

Those four results only show the metapropaganda limitations. There are more countries in the world that are less "fancy" and included in the list. Weird that you don't include America though. BTW, your comment reminds me this very basic espionage issue [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/bdjh8o/til_t...

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#17
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russia, China, Iran, and Israel https://www.npr.org/2024/05/30/g-s1-1670/openai-influence-op...

This doesn’t pass the sniff test. Each of these countries has domestically developed, strong LLMs. And even if they did not, they’d have absolutely no issue running the larger FOSS ones. You don’t need GPT4 to generate political drivel.

Sounds like OpenAI marketing is stronger than patriotism for home-grown LLMs.

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#18
post #15

From a Google search it looks like this is one of the articles in question: https://teorator.com/index.php/2024/08/12/x-censors-trumps-t... I requested the Internet Archive grab this copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20240816210620/https://teorator....

Looks exceedingly good to be Ai-generated. Also, it appears to be slightly pro-Trump, which doesn't sound like in Iran's interest.

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#19
post #17
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t pass the sniff test. Each of these countries has domestically developed, strong LLMs. And even if they did not, they’d have absolutely no issue running the larger FOSS ones. You don’t need GPT4 to generate political drivel.

Sounds like OpenAI marketing is stronger than patriotism for home-grown LLMs.

More likely someone is trying to pass a few basement dwellers as major nation state influence operations.

Re: Disrupting a covert Iranian influence operation

#20
post #6

The only thing noteworthy about this is how small-scale this is, and that the perpetrators don't even bother/have the means to set up their own infrastructure.

The noteworthy thing is that OpenAI is reporting it. They’re signaling that they are proactively monitoring and investigating this activity, and that they’re willing to work with federal agencies while self-policing their negative externalities.

This is all part of an ongoing conversation with lobbyists about “safe AI,” and it’s ultimately done to show that OpenAI is making an effort to mitigate the risks that regulators claim it creates.

But there’s also another signal, which is what they’re not broadcasting: “ChatGPT can be used for propaganda, it works in Persian too, and we’re happy to sell to the DoD.”

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