OpenAI says it took down a malicious Russian plan to spread misinformation on ChatGPT
The International Burke Institute was central to the social influence campaign, designed to paint Russia in a better light than its Western counterparts.
OpenAI has thwarted a Russian-influenced misinformation campaign aimed at swaying Western public opinion in favor of Russia, according to the tech company. The operation, believed to originate from Russia, featured a seemingly credible think tank called the International Burke Institute (IBI). The campaign sought to convince Western audiences that Russia was superior to Western countries, particularly in the context of the ongoing conflict with Ukraine.
To make the IBI appear legitimate, the threat actors used stolen academic works, misattributed to other authors, and employed AI to generate matching profile pictures for some accounts. The IBI website also boasted an index called the "Burke Sovereignty Index," which purportedly measured countries' political, economic, technological, informational, cultural, cognitive, and military factors, but OpenAI found the rankings to be inconsistent and biased against Western nations.
Despite the campaign's limited reach, with Telegram channels amassing followings of between ten to twenty thousand, the infrastructure behind the IBI was evidently well-designed to appear authentic and credible.
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