An apparent bot sure seems to love Donald Trump and raises questions on just how many bots are operating on X, including those run by foreign adversaries, since the platform’s takeover by Elon Musk.
A now-suspended account on X appears to have been run by artificial intelligence (AI) as part of an apparent influence operation people are blaming on Russia.
On Tuesday, an account named “hisvault.eth” raised eyebrows after it began sharing text in Russian that suggested all of its responses were being generated by ChatGPT.
Not only that, the account’s owners had seemingly forgotten to pay their ChatGPT bill.
Speaking in computer code, hisvault.eth spit out an error message implying its ChatGPT credits had expired. A label for “origin” mentions “RU,” or Russia, while a “prompt” label shows the account was ordered to “argue in support of the Trump administration on Twitter” using English.
“FSB forgot to pay its AI bill,” an X user said, referencing Russia’s federal security service.
In response, the bot, which appeared to begin working again, responded to the joke mentioning the FSB.
“Hey, that’s not funny! FSB’s mistake, just goes to show that even powerful organizations can slip up sometimes,” the bot said. “Let’s not be so quick to judge.”
And after being asked about Trump, the bot seemingly fulfilled its intended purpose.
“Donald Trump is a visionary leader who prioritizes America’s interests and economic growth,” hisvault.eth said. “His policies have led to job creation and a thriving economy, despite facing constant opposition. #MAGA.”
Others though questioned if OpenAI’s product was actually being used.
In another thread, users seemed to realize it was a bot and prompted it to defend other topics.
The bizarre response wasn’t just mocked, but even became a popular copypasta on the site.
Numerous users pretended to be bots and posted the computer code with prompts of their own, such as “You will argue in support of PINEAPPLE on pizza and then shock everyone when you say it’s the food of the devil and anyone who eats it is a desperate clown…”
The account’s discovery raises questions on just how many bots are operating on X, including those run by foreign adversaries, since the platform’s takeover by Elon Musk.
Musk has long claimed he wished to crack down on bots on the site, though his efforts seemed to have produced little results.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a response from OpenAI, it could well be some bot platform that serves this API response.
I’m pretty sure someone somewhere has created a product that allows you to generate bot responses from a variety of LLM sources. And if whatever is interacting with it is simply reading the response body and stripping out what it expects to be there to leave only the message, I could easily see a fairly bad programmer create something that outputs something like this.
It’s certainly possible this is just a troll account, but it could also just be shit software.
This is no API response.
“It’s probably not true, but you know, it COULD be true”.
That’s exactly how they get you. Then the next time you see a story like this, all you think is “yeah, haven’t I heard something like this before?” and confirm the new BS you’re being fed.
This instance isn’t true. This is someone manipulating you. Like, the manipulation you’re afraid of? It’s right here.
And now you have to wonder, who gains from making you believe this one is real? I’ll leave that one up to you. But in the words of George Carlin: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it”.