The Washington Post reports:

“The bill will follow Americans beyond the fighting itself,” an opinion piece in the Port St. Joe Star, a tiny Florida weekly newspaper, warned of the Iran war last month.

The article ran under the byline Ervin Hoskins, which has also appeared on articles critical of the war in larger publications including Daily Kos and Middle East Monitor, which together have more than 3 million followers on Facebook.

But ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Thursday that Hoskins’s purported work was generated using its chatbot by users based in Iran as part of an “influence campaign.” The campaign placed about 100 fake articles across at least 20 news outlets, the company said.

The author photo on the Hoskins column published by the Star was generated using OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tools, according to the company’s online verification tool.

As artificial intelligence tools have become more powerful, some news outlets have been forced to delete AI-generated content published under fake bylines that initially went undetected by editors. Business Insider and Wired removed a series of articles last year that appeared under the byline Margaux Blanchard and appeared to be AI-generated.

But while it was unclear who or what was behind the stories written by Blanchard and some other apparently fake personas, OpenAI said in a Thursday report on use of ChatGPT in political influence campaigns that Hoskins was part of an operation focused on spreading content about U.S. military action in Iran. Many of the articles highlighted negative impacts of the war on Americans. [Continue reading…]