Chinese police have arrested a man for disseminating a fake news article using the Artificial Intelligence or AI bot ChatGPT that claimed nine people had been killed in a local train accident on April 25.
Police in northwestern China’s Gansu said in a statement on Sunday that a suspect surnamed Hong had been detained for “using artificial intelligence technology to concoct false and untrue information,” reported the South China Morning Post.
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The cybersecurity officials found that the article was published by more than 20 accounts on Baijiahao, a blog-style platform run by Chinese search engine giant Baidu.
The arrest comes after the country in January implemented provisions to regulate the use of “deepfake” technology. The provisions, titled the Administrative Provisions on Deep Synthesis for Internet Information Service, define deep synthesis as the use of technologies – including deep learning and augmented reality – to generate text, images, audio, and video and to create virtual scenarios.
The police arrested the suspect Hong after tracing the origins of the article of a company owned by him. Cops had also searched his house and computer after closing in on him in Guangdong province in southern China.
{{/usCountry}}The police arrested the suspect Hong after tracing the origins of the article of a company owned by him. Cops had also searched his house and computer after closing in on him in Guangdong province in southern China.
{{/usCountry}}According to the police, Hong confessed to bypassing Baijiahao’s duplication check function to publish the story on multiple accounts he had acquired. To produce different versions of the same fake story, he had input elements of trending stories in China from the past 10 years and uploaded them on his social media accounts.
Hong will be charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, which carries a maximum sentence of five years. But in cases that are deemed especially severe, offenders can be jailed for 10 years and given additional penalties.