- Police in China recently detained a man who used ChatGPT to generate fake news about a train crash.
- The accused person, identified only as Hong, operates an independent social media company.
China made its first public arrest for misusing ChatGPT five months after the AI chatbot went viral for its ability to generate written human-like text.
A man — identified only by his surname Hong — has been accused of using the chatbot to generate the fake news of a fatal train crash that killed nine people in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu, police in the Kongtong district said on its official WeChat account on Sunday.
The police documented the arrest in a series of photo on the WeChat post.
Hong's arrest is the first detainment since China's new regulation on deep fake technology took effect in January. The law aims to prevent the misuse of technology that can alter face and voice data.
And while ChatGPT is blocked in China, there are workarounds such as virtual private networks.
The local cybersecurity police unit was alerted to the article about the train crash — published on April 25 — upon which it launched an investigation into the matter.
The authorities then found that 21 blog-style accounts on Baidu — China's equivalent of Google — had simultaneously published similar fake articles featuring different locations.
By then, these multiple posts had been viewed over 15,000 times, according to the Gansu police.
Gansu's cybersecurity police tracked down the fake posts to an independent company operated by Hong registered in the southern tech hub of Shenzhen.
Hong then admitted he used ChatGPT to generate fake news about the train crashes before posting them online, per the Gansu police.
He is being held under the suspicion of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" a charge that carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years. Investigations are ongoing, the Gansu police said in the WeChat post.