A network originating in Russia used ChatGPT to promote an organization that posed as an academic institute, according to an OpenAI report published Wednesday. OpenAI banned a group of accounts whose operators used Russian-language prompts to generate social media posts and comments, mostly in English, and instructed the chatbot to conceal signs of Russian origin.
Because ChatGPT is unavailable in Russia, the group employed virtual private networks (VPNs) to disguise their location. The campaign promoted the International Burke Institute (IBI), which claimed to be an Israel-based expert group, through official-looking profiles and accounts posing as regular users. OpenAI found that 34 of 36 articles it reviewed on the institute’s website were copied, with some credited to academics who did not write them.
“Some of these articles were years old; others were attributed to the wrong authors,” OpenAI wrote, noting one article on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was copied from a Cambridge University Press original but incorrectly attributed to a professor at the University of Nottingham. Similar political influence campaigns have also used generative AI.
In 2024, OpenAI identified a separate Russia-linked campaign called Doppelganger, which used ChatGPT to create content praising Russia and attacking Ukraine, NATO, and the United States. Russia-linked groups have also used ChatGPT for cyber operations, with the Forest Blizzard group tied to Russian military intelligence using the chatbot to research targets and write phishing scripts.
While the group may have used Russian language prompts, OpenAI did not attribute the IBI campaign to the Russian government. “We are not in a position to determine the relationship between these individuals, the IBI, and the operators in Russia,” the company wrote.
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