OpenAI said on Friday that it had uncovered evidence that a Chinese security operation had built an artificial intelligence-powered surveillance tool to gather real-time reports about anti-Chinese posts on social media services in Western countries.
The company’s researchers said they had identified this new campaign, which they called Peer Review, because someone working on the tool used OpenAI’s technologies to debug some of the computer code that underpins it.
Ben Nimmo, a principal investigator for OpenAI, said this was the first time the company had uncovered an AI-powered surveillance tool of this kind. “Threat actors sometimes give us a glimpse of what they are doing in other parts of the internet because of the way they use our AI models.”
There have been growing concerns that AI can be used for surveillance, computer hacking, disinformation campaigns and other malicious purposes. Though researchers say the technology can certainly enable these kinds of activities, they add that AI can also help stop such behaviour.
Nimmo and his team believe the Chinese surveillance tool is based on Llama, an AI technology built by Meta, which open sourced its technology. OpenAI also said it had uncovered a separate Chinese campaign that used OpenAI’s technologies to generate English-language posts that criticised Chinese dissidents.