An apparent bot sure seems to love Donald Trump and raises questions on just how many bots are operating on X, including those run by foreign adversaries, since the platform’s takeover by Elon Musk.
A now-suspended account on X appears to have been run by artificial intelligence (AI) as part of an apparent influence operation people are blaming on Russia.
On Tuesday, an account named “hisvault.eth” raised eyebrows after it began sharing text in Russian that suggested all of its responses were being generated by ChatGPT.
Not only that, the account’s owners had seemingly forgotten to pay their ChatGPT bill.
Speaking in computer code, hisvault.eth spit out an error message implying its ChatGPT credits had expired. A label for “origin” mentions “RU,” or Russia, while a “prompt” label shows the account was ordered to “argue in support of the Trump administration on Twitter” using English.
“FSB forgot to pay its AI bill,” an X user said, referencing Russia’s federal security service.
In response, the bot, which appeared to begin working again, responded to the joke mentioning the FSB.
“Hey, that’s not funny! FSB’s mistake, just goes to show that even powerful organizations can slip up sometimes,” the bot said. “Let’s not be so quick to judge.”
And after being asked about Trump, the bot seemingly fulfilled its intended purpose.
“Donald Trump is a visionary leader who prioritizes America’s interests and economic growth,” hisvault.eth said. “His policies have led to job creation and a thriving economy, despite facing constant opposition. #MAGA.”
Others though questioned if OpenAI’s product was actually being used.
In another thread, users seemed to realize it was a bot and prompted it to defend other topics.
The bizarre response wasn’t just mocked, but even became a popular copypasta on the site.
Numerous users pretended to be bots and posted the computer code with prompts of their own, such as “You will argue in support of PINEAPPLE on pizza and then shock everyone when you say it’s the food of the devil and anyone who eats it is a desperate clown…”
The account’s discovery raises questions on just how many bots are operating on X, including those run by foreign adversaries, since the platform’s takeover by Elon Musk.
Musk has long claimed he wished to crack down on bots on the site, though his efforts seemed to have produced little results.
The account’s discovery raises questions on just how many bots are operating on X
I have yet to encounter an actual user of the platform X in the real world.
Imho this is actually a very serious problem. They are undermining our society with this. We should push tech companies to block, its technically very feasible.
Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?!?!!
This is a very easy to flag, given the intelligence of the people working at OpenAI. Russian IP, political topic, high post frequency. But blocking them has an opportunity cost in identifiable dollar value, doing nothing only costs them a few pithy press releases and a “commitment to truthfulness and openness”.
Move fast and break things, right? As long as the money rolls in… Just this time they’re breaking the fabric of reality binding society together.
I used to work in the industry that prevents this, trust and safety. It’s like DEI. If an individual with enough clout gives a shit and takes the time to make it happen, or if a bad thing happens and a corporation needs to make a show of caring to cover their asses, that’s when they invest the minimum.
This is a major problem for all democracies, and LLM driven troll accounts probably do exist. But this xitter post is a fake error message. It’s clearly a troll.
Blocking fake accounts would help with the misinformation problem, but it’s a cat and mouse game. It could ultimately give additional credence to the trolls who slip through if the platform is assumed to be safe. The reality is that there will always be ways for fake accounts to avoid detection and to spoof account verification. Making it harder would help, but it’s not a comprehensive solution. Not to mention the fact that the platform itself has the power to manipulate public opinion, amplify their preferred narrative, etc.
The solution I’ve always preferred is the mentality the 4chan community had when I was younger and frequented it. Basically, and I’m paraphrasing:
Everyone here needs to grow up and understand that no post should ever be presumed to be true or legitimate. This is an anonymous forum. Assume that everything was written by a bot or a troll in the absence of proof that it wasn’t.
I think people put too much trust in social media precisely because they assume that there’s a real person behind every post. They assume that a face and a few photos gives an account legitimacy, despite the fact that it’s trivial to copy photos from a random account (2015/16 pro-Trump Facebook style) or just generate all of the content from scratch with AI (to avoid duplicate detection).
Trust itself is driver of misinformation. On social media, people should only fully trust posts made by people they know. That is the simplest and most comprehensive solution to the problem.
This is most likely fake. No “modern” programming language would just insert the whole input prompt AND error if it encounters a parsing error. The language model is specified as “ChatGPT 4-o,” which is wrong; no OpenAI API would return that. It would be “GPT-4o.” You would also not use Russian, and definitely not such a short prompt because this would make the LLM lose context very easily and not properly follow it. Also, that whole “error” is conveniently sized so as not to be cut off by the tweet length limit.
Sorry you’re being downvotted by the misinformed. It’s not even in the format for ChatGPT, especially the part about being out of tokens. It’s been pointed out already that that is psuedo-code, not actual code. It’s meant to look like something ChatGPT would say.
It’s a troll/ragebait account.
This isn’t news. At all. This is basically reporting on “the hacker known as 4Chan”.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a response from OpenAI, it could well be some bot platform that serves this API response.
I’m pretty sure someone somewhere has created a product that allows you to generate bot responses from a variety of LLM sources. And if whatever is interacting with it is simply reading the response body and stripping out what it expects to be there to leave only the message, I could easily see a fairly bad programmer create something that outputs something like this.
It’s certainly possible this is just a troll account, but it could also just be shit software.
“It’s probably not true, but you know, it COULD be true”.
That’s exactly how they get you. Then the next time you see a story like this, all you think is “yeah, haven’t I heard something like this before?” and confirm the new BS you’re being fed.
This instance isn’t true. This is someone manipulating you. Like, the manipulation you’re afraid of? It’s right here.
And now you have to wonder, who gains from making you believe this one is real? I’ll leave that one up to you. But in the words of George Carlin: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it”.
Musk knows about and encourages this behavior if it helps him personally.
You shouldn’t confuse Russian politics and Russian people.
There have been some amazingly intelegent Russians.
