A suspect identified only as "Hong" was detained by local authorities and arrested in China's Gansu region after allegedly using ChatGPT to generate fake news reports.
Hong was detained after law enforcement officials discovered an unverified article about the train crash on April 18, the South China Morning Post reported. Hong was arrested for "using artificial intelligence technology to fabricate false and untrue information" after cybers security experts found at least 20 accounts Simultaneously posting the fake news article to a popular blog site hosted by Chinese tech conglomerate Baidu.
China's laws on the use of social media are considered to be among the strictest in the world. Police said Hong was arrested for violating the "picking quarrels and provoking troubles" ordinance, a law that sweeps across the Internet to spread fake news and rumors.
If charged, Hong could face up to five years in prison under normal statutes. However, if the court deems the offense extremely egregious, they could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison under an extension of the law covering crimes deemed particular arly serious. Although the ChatGPT service is currently banned in China, its use can be confused with a virtual private network (VPN). Similar home-grown artificial intelligence (AI) services, such as Alibaba's "Synonymous Thousand Questions," a recently announced generative AI model trained to answer questions in English and Mandarin, is backed by the Chinese government . However, as Cointelegraph reported in mid-April, it is unclear whether Uniqianwen has the same authoring capabilities as ChatGPT.
China's lack of robust generative AI models could have a chilling effect on the country's tech sector, especially in areas such as fintech and cryptocurrency trading, where the use of ChatGPT and products built on OpenAI's GPT API has been hugely popular. .
