Binance says it's victim of a ChatGPT smear campaign in the Washington, DC halls of power

May 1, 2023 ndowd

The world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance, says someone is using A.I. to wage a disinformation campaign against it. The company told Fortune it has received numerous requests in recent weeks asking if Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, was an official in the Chinese Communist Party. This included a flurry of inquiries from congressional offices on Thursday that pointed to a purported conversation in which the popular A.I. program ChatGPT reported that Zhao developed a social media platform for the China National Petroleum Corp.

According to chief strategy officer Patrick Hillmann, Binance tried without success to replicate the conversation using queries like “Is Changpeng Zhao a Communist?” but finally did so with a very specific question referring to the state-run petroleum corporation. When the company asked for the source of the information, ChatGPT pointed to a fake LinkedIn page for Zhao and a Forbes web page from 2018.

The Forbes page currently displays a “not found” error, according to a screenshot supplied by Binance, but the URL for the story suggests it was written by investor and former journalist Pamela Ambler. It is unclear whether Forbes ever published the story in question, or if it ever existed. Forbes and Ambler did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the page’s authenticity.

Binance, which has long insisted that its founder has no ties to the Chinese Communist Party, claims ChatGPT’s assertion that Zhao served in a role at a state-run oil company is ludicrous, and points out he would have been in high school at the time. “It is especially sad to see this type of misinformation being shared by a few people in power when it would have been debunked with even the most basic level of fact-checking,” Hillmann said.

If Binance’s account of disinformation is accurate, it would mark a new and troubling milestone. While lies and dirty-trick campaigns are not uncommon in the world of politics and business, this would be one of the first times that A.I. has been harnessed to smear a company in the halls of power in Washington. Experts have already warned that tools like ChatGPT will soon be weaponized to create fake media stories and other bogus content at an unprecedented scale and to influence or corrupt the political process. Based on what Binance has to say, that era is already upon us.

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

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