This country just arrested a man for ‘misusing’ ChatGPT

China has arrested a man for using ChatGPT to spread fake news (Representational image)

Police in China have arrested a man for misusing ChatGPT to spread fake news. The case is believed to be the first of its kind in China where a person has been arrested for misusing artificial intelligence.

According to a report in The Independent, police in Gansu province arrested the man, surnamed Hong, for using ChatGPT to generate several fake news pieces about a fictional train crash. The accused then shared the fake news articles on social media, where they were widely circulated.

The fake news articles claimed that nine people had been killed in the train crash on April 25. Hong used ChatGPT to create several versions of the same article with slight modifications to each.

By the time the fake news came to the attention of authorities, the articles had received more than 15,000 views on Chinese search giant Baidu, according to CNBC.

AI exploded into the public consciousness last year with ChatGPT, a bot capable of generating tracts of coherent text from short prompts.

The wild popularity of the bot sparked a race between tech giants like Google and Microsoft to embed AI in everything from spreadsheets to search tools, and prompted investors to pour money into AI startups.

But sceptics have pointed to the several ways in which AI can be misused, not the least of which is the dissemination of fake news. Earlier this month, computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, often dubbed "the godfather of AI", quit his job at Google to warn of the "profound risks to society and humanity" of the technology.