Scientists found more than 1,000 AI spam bots trying to scam people and steal their social media profiles — and regulators can't keep up
Scientists found more than 1,000 AI spam bots trying to scam people and steal their social media profiles — and regulators can't keep up
Social media is being flooded with spammy AI content. Research by Indiana University details how artificial intelligence is being used to scam people on social media platforms.
If you get a message, or see something on a social media platform urging you to buy crypto or NFTs, it's 100% a scam. It doesn't take an AI detector to figure that out.
"Regulators can't keep up" is like the history of the tech industry in a nutshell.
Who would have seen this coming
Stopping the scam bots has always been like fighting a hydra. You kill one head and a million more pop up.
This makes it sound like the robots have gone wilde, while in reality humans are setting up the spam bots. #saveTheBots
The "dead internet" is getting closer
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A new study shared last month by researchers at Indiana University's Observatory on Social Media details how malicious actors are taking advantage of OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT, which became the fastest-growing consumer AI application ever this February.
The rise of social media gave bad actors a cheap way to reach a large audience and monetize false or misleading content, Menczer said.
New AI tools "further lower the cost to generate false but credible content at scale, defeating the already weak moderation defenses of social-media platforms," he said.
In the past few years, social-media bots — accounts that are wholly or partly controlled by software — have been routinely deployed to amplify misinformation about events, from elections to public-health crises such as COVID.
The AI bots in the network uncovered by the researchers mainly posted about fraudulent crypto and NFT campaigns and promoted suspicious websites on similar topics, which themselves were likely written with ChatGPT, the survey says.
Yang said that tracking suspects' social-media activity patterns, whether they have a history of spreading false claims and how diverse in language and content their previous posts are, is a more reliable way to identify bots.
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Thank you good bot, please take my social media profile.
This is how they get you
It's you! Guys, I found the bot!
Pitchforks, everyone!
Here’s a shorter summary:
Researchers found over 1,000 AI spam bots on social media using ChatGPT to promote scams, especially in cryptocurrency. These bots imitate humans, making detection harder and potentially degrading online information quality. Without regulation, malicious actors could outpace efforts to combat AI-generated content, posing a threat to the internet's reliability.
Made me think of letting Ai bots fight ai bots and watch everything burn down 🍿😅
Let's have AI regulators!