A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT revealed an intimidation operation (cnn.com)
72 points by cwwc 6 hours ago
lxgr 37 minutes ago
This seems to be the source report: https://openai.com/index/disrupting-malicious-ai-uses/ (since it would of course kill CNN, like almost all media outlets, to link to a non-affiliated primary source...)
Does this level of detail seem strange to anybody else? Shining such a strong light on OpenAI's moderation/manual review efforts seems like it would draw unwanted attention to the fact that ChatGPT conversations are anything but private, and seems somewhat at odds with their recent outrage about the subpoena for user chats in the NYT case.
Manual reviews of sensitive data are ok as long as their own employees are the reviewers, I suppose?
Palmik 8 minutes ago
From Anthropics recent blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
> By examining request metadata, we were able to trace these accounts to specific researchers at the lab.
> The volume, structure, and focus of the prompts were distinct from normal usage patterns
Clearly some employees of Anthropic personally looked at individual inputs and outputs of their API
coliveira 34 minutes ago
Yes, it is either a lie or an admission that OpenAI is a global surveillance mechanism.
andai 27 minutes ago
Alas! My vision of One Fed Per Child hath come to pass!
jajuuka 33 minutes ago
This feels very planted. Wouldn't be surprised if this some attempt to look patriotic with the DoW turning up the heat against Anthropic.
ticulatedspline 24 minutes ago
that creepy feeling of "being watched" has mostly kept me from taking advantage of any SOTA models, i only dabble in a few local ones.
The level of detail does not seem surprising. they're both charged with maintaining a facade of privacy while eliminating any and all miss-use. Certainly they heavily analyze basically everything given to them.
And generally as a society we've been ok with basically zero privacy as long as the data we send stays inside the company we sent it too. Google reads all your emails? Sure thing, read away, just don't send them to the popo. Apple knows when you're ovulating? no problem, just don't tell Amazon. etc
layer8 2 hours ago
I wonder what exactly the trigger conditions are that lead to the chats of an account being human-reviewed by OpenAI.
coliveira 35 minutes ago
So, it seems they're openly admitting that OpenAI is a surveillance mechanism used at the discretion of the US gov.
simlevesque an hour ago
I'm pretty sure they can just prompt any convo in the background and ask "is this conversation sensitive ?" and the model can answer without this being added to the context of the convo.
morkalork 20 minutes ago
Such a hot topic these days: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/chatgpt-and-the-tumbler...
LightBug1 an hour ago
This is -the- question.
spwa4 an hour ago
"Is this someone important enough to spy on?"
One hopes the CIA/Secret service would be willing to provide the human to do the reviewing but sadly I've worked for European telco's and I know better.
dlev_pika an hour ago
Sounds like Anthropic is fighting this exact battle, and DOD is arguing they don’t want to do that lol
upupupandaway 6 hours ago
I was in Shanghai recently and while casually testing one of their AI chat bots I typed "What do you think of the situation in Taiwan?".
It started discussing like a Western bot would - "it's complicated, etc. etc." and around 5s it abruptly stopped and regurgitated the same line the CCP uses "... it's an unalienable part of China etc. etc.".
After printing the line, a popup opened and my camera was activated. The app wanted me to submit my information, presumably to decide what to do with me next time I enter China.
1) All the lights and modern buildings cannot hide that China is a creepy authoritarian state underneath.
2) Given the bot started printing the Western consensus first, I bet $10 it was trained by distilling ChatGPT or Gemini.
titaniumtown 2 hours ago
> After printing the line, a popup opened and my camera was activated. The app wanted me to submit my information, presumably to decide what to do with me next time I enter China.
Was this on your personal device? I'm just wondering how it activated your camera. I would love more details!
anvuong an hour ago
Yeah that part is either just bullshit or OP gave the bot access to his camera previously, which is just dumb.
9999px 2 hours ago
He's lying.
parl_match 31 minutes ago
3rodents an hour ago
If this were true, why didn’t the chatbot immediately recognize that the word “Taiwan” should trigger the response? Detecting the word “Taiwan” has been possible since before most of us were born.
China has more restrictions on what you can say than the U.S. but what you are describing is not reality. Some westerner asking Deepseek about Taiwan is completely uninteresting. Just as the government do not chase people over VPN usage.
China doesn’t try to hide that they are an authoritarian state. They don’t need to. Most people in China are no less happy with their government than westerners are with their governments. Governments reflect culture. And as for foreigners, our view of China is far worse than it actually is, China doesn’t need to hide anything, people who visit China will come away with a more positive view of the country than those who do not visit.
sarchertech 32 minutes ago
>And as for foreigners, our view of China is far worse than it actually is, China doesn’t need to hide anything, people who visit China will come away with a more positive view of the country than those who do not visit.
To the extent that's true, it's because they won't let you see the uyghur reeducation camps.
MaxPock 28 minutes ago
hungryhobo 30 minutes ago
CWuestefeld an hour ago
This is manifestly false.
My wife grew up in Shanghai, and you'll have to go quite some distance to find someone more critical of the PRC and CCP than she is. And it's with good reason.
She grew up during the cultural revolution, and was largely raised by her grandmother because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp, not because of anything they had actually done wrong, but for political reasons because the whole family was blacklisted.
And that's not just the old days. Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy. During the pandemic her cousins still in the country would ask her (on Skype) "is X true?", and largely their perception of what was going on was false. She would exfiltrate encrypted news reports to them - until those started getting blocked. Her dad's estate still has affairs that need to be resolved, but we've decided not to return to China until Xi is gone, as it's just not safe. It doesn't get much airplay, but there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now. It's not worth the risk.
My first trip to China was about 30 years ago, shortly after we got married. And back then, I would have said that you were right. Honestly, it felt like for the average person in their day-to-day-lives, the Chinese were less under the governmental thumb than we are. People from the countryside would bring their produce into the city to sell, or cook dumplings and buns to sell on the side of the street - stuff that in America we'd have to get permits for. It seemed that the oligarchy had an understanding with the people: let us control the big picture, and we'll look the other way for the little things. But Chinese politics is a pendulum swinging very widely. From Tienanmen Square and Tank Man, it had swung quite a bit the other way. But today, it's come back 180-degrees. Xi is really trying for a Cultural Revolution 2.0.
These impressions largely match what I hear from other Chinese immigrants - except for Party members, who tend not to want to talk about it at all. I'm afraid that you've been listening to too much propaganda.
3rodents an hour ago
hungryhobo 25 minutes ago
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm an hour ago
Same thing happened to me, except it was a facetime call from Xi.
chausen 34 minutes ago
Lol
jajuuka 31 minutes ago
I love Hacker News fiction. Wild stuff. haha
layer8 an hour ago
This is the report on which the CNN article is based (which it doesn’t link to): https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/df438d70-e3fe-4a6c-a403-ff632def8...
CrzyLngPwd an hour ago
Pushing aside the fact that OpenAI is just a tool of the US regime.
Will OpenAI release the same for other government officials from any other states?
I can't wait to see Starmer's chats with ChatGPT.
Anyway, all of this smells like 1934, "accusing them of what we are already doing"
mrdependable 2 hours ago
Wow, our surveillance helped take down their surveillance. Yay, I guess?
AceJohnny2 an hour ago
"Our glorious oversight vs their barbaric surveillance"
(I kid, mostly. While the US certainly isn't pure, its scale of surveillance intrusion is light compared to China)
pcthrowaway an hour ago
> While the US certainly isn't pure, its scale of surveillance intrusion is light compared to China
I assume that for someone to believe this, they either have to believe the U.S. has poorer surveillance capability than China, or, more likely, they consider U.S. surveillance unintrusive and Chinese surveillance intrusive.
cc-d 35 minutes ago
There is mass neurocompromise, assigning agency to specific state actors does not make much sense.
Big tech is well aware of this, and much of their industry, relies on this. Many people reading this will know this to be true, and are very saddened by this, but keep their mouths shut, because they are 1. comfy 2. smart (we all know it does not matter)
This is such common knowledge that I feel kind of cringe even posting about this, but I am not being given a choice, nor a choice in this edit.
Edit: If anybody wants to chat to somebody who has had his organism compromised by what is, very deniablely, an intelligence agency (or a system/organization intelligence agency adjacent), just reply to this comment. They have not treated me too poorly.
dddddaviddddd 2 hours ago
More interesting than the fact that ChatGPT was used, was seeing all the specific examples of the types of work that this individual was doing.
kykat an hour ago
The amount of information about everything that people are giving OpenAI is astronomical, information that was previously kept closely guarded is now just freely flowing through foreign servers.
Truly a paradise for american intelligence. Would have expected that the chinese officials be briefed on not using us tech companies, but opsec is hard to teach, and even harder to always follow.
simmerup an hour ago
But the american silicon valley nerds pinky swear not to look!
How can you not trust them.
bucketdeveloper 12 minutes ago
Did they though?
I never got to the end of the Terms & Conditions myself.
romulussilvia 39 minutes ago
I remember a while back when a few cars with CCP decals driving around SoCal to intimidate some dissidents!
zoklet-enjoyer 8 minutes ago
Very creepy on the part of Open AI. Glad I don't use chatgpt
gitpusher an hour ago
> “This is what Chinese modern transnational repression looks like,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI, told reporters ahead of the report’s release. “It’s not just digital. It’s not just about trolling. It’s industrialized. [...]
There's something poetic about OpenAI being asked to comment on mis-use of their slop generator, and their answer is composed entirely of AI slop.
dlev_pika an hour ago
Crazy to me that Chinese officials use ChatGPT to discuss sensitive operations lmao
guelo an hour ago
I'm assuming they would not disclose such campaigns by the US government.
I can't imagine the amount of government secrets, trade secrets, business plans, personal secrets, etc that people divulge on there.
tehjoker 42 minutes ago
i kinda get the impression this was from 2023 and also it is not clear what this dissident did, hard to evaluate whether i should care without knowing that
2OEH8eoCRo0 an hour ago
> “It’s not just digital. It’s not just about trolling. It’s industrialized. It’s about trying to hit critics of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] with everything, everywhere, all at once.”