OpenAI Deactivates Accounts Used By Iran Election Influence Group

Microsoft-backed OpenAI said it has deactivated multiple ChatGPT accounts used by an Iranian group to generate content meant to influence the US presidential election and other topics of debate.

The group, tracked as Storm-2035, used AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate fake news articles and social media comments as part of an influence campaign, OpenAI said.

Topics of the posts included the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, the conflict in Gaza and Israel’s presence at the Olympic Games, OpenAI said.

The move comes after Microsoft this month warned that the same group was operating four websites pretending to be news outlets that were actively engaging US voter groups on opposing ends of the political spectrum.

Influence operation

The company said it found a dozen accounts on X, formerly Twitter, and one Instagram account being used by the group.

Meta said it deactivated the Instagram account and that it was linked to a 2021 Iranian campaign that targeted users in Scotland.

OpenAI said the X accounts had also been taken down.

The company said the ChatGPT-generated posts and articles appeared to have attracted little or no interest on social media.

“There’s a big difference between an influence operation posting online and actually becoming influential by reaching an audience,” said Ben Nimmo, principal investigator with OpenAI’s intelligence and investigations team.

The operation was the first taken down by OpenAI that focused on the US elections.

Campaign hack

In May OpenAI said it disrupted malicious groups affiliated with China, Iran, North Korea and Russia that tried to use OpenAI services mostly for technical tasks, such as querying open-source information, translating text, finding coding errors and running basic coding tasks.

In the same alert in which it detailed the activities of Storm-2035, Microsoft also said an Iranian group linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sent a spear-phishing email in June to a “high-ranking official” on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor.

The campaign of candidate Donald Trump later indicated it had been hacked by the group after political news site Politico reported it began receiving internal documents from the campaign.