As Ghana approaches the December 7 presidential election, researchers have discovered a network of 171 bot accounts on X using ChatGPT to write messages favorable to the ruling political party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

According to new research conducted by NewsGuarda website that offers tools to assess media accuracy and reliability, bot accounts have uniformly promoted NPP candidate Mahamudu Bawumia and his right-wing arguments, often using the hashtags #Bawumia2024, #NPP and the NPP slogan # It’s possible. The accounts appear to have been active since February.

“Admiring Dr. Bawumia’s commitment to transforming Ghana,” a statement read. September article on a robot created by AI. “Its profound impact on our national policies and progress cannot be overstated. #Bawumia2024 #NPP.

The accounts – which appear to have AI-generated profile photos and go by names such as “Glenn Washington,” “Netflix Series&Movies” and “Patriot” – also denigrate John Mahama, the presidential candidate of the rival left-wing party National Democratic. Congress. These posts often use hashtags such as #mahamaisaliar and #DrunkmaniMahama, accusing Mahama of being a drunk. (Mahama denied this.)

“The network’s main goal appears to be to amplify pro-NPP messaging, promote the Bawumia administration and target the opposition National Democratic Congress,” said McKenzie Sadeghi, editor-in-chief of AI and Foreign Influence at NewsGuard who contributed to the research. said Rest of the world.

Dimitris Dimitriadis, NewsGuard’s director of research and development, said in an interview with Rest of the world that bot accounts tend to post at “regular” and “predictable” intervals, often ten or more times per day. He said the accounts – which tend to be active between 8am and 6pm in Ghana – mainly receive likes and reposts from other members of the botnet. These patterns regulated in timing and style alerted researchers that the accounts could be false.

The NewsGuard research team fed the accounts’ 171 posts into a Pangram Labs tool, which assesses the likelihood that text is generated by AI, Dimitriadis said. The tool concluded that it was “highly likely” that all accounts were posting AI-generated content created by ChatGPT.

Over the past two years, NewsGuard has “tracked and located a number of instances of manipulated behavior on X,” Dimitriadis said.

X’s content moderation has declined significantly since 2022, when Elon Musk acquired the company, then called Twitter. Musk quickly fired most of the website’s content moderators and about 80% of its trusted and security engineers, who identified and removed foreign influence campaigns. X cut later half of its election integrity unitjust weeks later CEO Linda Yaccarino has promised to expand it. A 2023 Report of European Unity claimed that under Musk’s leadership, the volume of misinformation and disinformation posts had exploded compared to other social media platforms.

The lack of control over the platform has created openings for political influence networks. With tools like ChatGPT, these networks can create new social media content at scale with nothing stopping them. “AI appears to be increasingly used by bad actors who seek to influence elections or democratic outcomes,” Dimitriadis said. Rest of the world.

Sadeghi said NewsGuard has observed many changes to X since Musk took the reins.

“We found that verified users on account for some of the most viral false or unsubstantiated claims,” Sadeghi said. “The blue check allows misinformation to appear higher and with greater prominence on the platform, which has proven to be a boon for bad actors.”

She added that a recent NewsGuard investigation found that a quarter of X users who responded thought users with blue checks were more trustworthy than those without them.

This year is a vulnerable political moment in Ghana. At least eight people were killed in Ghana during the last electoral cycle in 2020, according to the US Department of State. Two of the killings were carried out by civilians and two others by military and police officers from the country’s Election Security Group.

NewsGuard said in its report that the network of 171 bot accounts “appears to be the first covertly partisan network using AI to influence elections in Ghana.”

NewsGuard shared its research results with X and OpenAI, Dimitriadis said. At the time of writing, two of the 171 accounts have been suspended and two have been restricted. Neither company responded to requests for comment from Rest of the world.

OpenAI has expressed concerns about people using ChatGPT to generate content that influences political discourse. According to an OpenAI report released in Octoberinfluencer networks use ChatGPT to post political social media posts and blogs “in the United States, Rwanda, and (to a lesser extent) India and the European Union.” The company claimed to have “disrupted” the activities of more than 20 of these networks.

The Ghanaian network did not introduce anything new into the country’s political discourse, Dimitriadis said, since all the hashtags and talking points contained in the network’s posts were already popular. He added that it is “inherently difficult” to assess the impact these stories have had on Ghana’s political discourse.

“One of the goals of the network was to very clearly direct traffic to a specific set of pro-NPP hashtags,” Dimitriadis said. “But obviously, because of the nature of hashtags and the fact that there are thousands of accounts every day that are promoting these hashtags, I think it’s very difficult to tease out that impact.”