OpenAI Bans Chinese Accounts Using ChatGPT for large-scale surveillance systems
According to a report published by OpenAI on October 7, suspected Chinese government operatives attempted to use ChatGPT to help draft proposals for large-scale surveillance systems. The same users also sought assistance from the model to promote another system allegedly designed to scan social media accounts for “extremist speech.”
The report warns of the growing risk that increasingly powerful artificial intelligence technologies could be used to make repression and surveillance mechanisms “more efficient.” OpenAI stated that these findings offer “a rare snapshot into the ways authoritarian regimes may seek to exploit AI.”
Ben Nimmo, Principal Investigator at OpenAI, said:“There’s a push within the People’s Republic of China to get better at using artificial intelligence for large-scale things like surveillance and monitoring. It’s not last year that the Chinese Communist Party started surveilling its own population. But now they’ve heard of AI and they’re thinking, oh maybe we can use this to get a little bit better.”
One of the cases described in the report, a ChatGPT user “likely connected to a Chinese government entity,” who categorized Uyghurs as “high-risk.” The user reportedly asked the model to help draft a proposal for an early-warning system that would analyze Uyghur travel movements by comparing transportation data with police records.