Last July, scientists revealed a study on “X”, formerly known as Twitter, where they ensure that the platform has a real problem with robots after finding 1,140 accounts driven by artificial intelligence that “they post machine-generated content and steal selfies to create fake personas.”
The investigation, conducted by a team of students and professors at Indiana University’s Social Media Observatory, found a network of fake X accounts in what they called the “Fox8” botnet, which allegedly uses ChatGPT to generate content that “has aiming to promote suspicious website and spread harmful content.”
Bot Accounts
Bot accounts, a computer program that acts like an automated account, try to convince people to invest in fake cryptocurrencies, and are even thought to steal from existing crypto wallets, scientists Kai-Cheng Yang and Filippo Menczer have found..
Their posts often include hashtags like #bitcoin, #crypto, and #web3, and they frequently interact with human-run accounts like Forbes’ crypto-focused X account. (@ForbesCrypto) and blockchain-focused news site Watcher Guru (@WatcherGuru). found the study.
Beyond the looting of cryptocurrencies, it was discovered that the Fox8 accounts “distorted online conversations and spread misinformation in a variety of contexts, from elections to public health crises”Yang and Menczer said.
Aim
The goal of a botnet is to spam X users with a large number of AI-generated posts. By tweeting frequently, these posts have a higher chance of being seen by a larger number of legitimate users, increasing the likelihood that a human will click on a fraudulent URL.
To appear more humane, this botnet, a network of hundreds of harmful spam accounts, not only captures photos of real users but also “frequently interact with each other through retweets and replies”has profile descriptions and even “has 74 followers, 140 friends and 149.6 tweets on average.”
These elements suggest that “Fox8 bots are actively participating in activities on Twitter [ahora conocido como X]” and make them more believable to the human user.
Fox8 profiles, most of which “were created more than seven years ago, and some were created in 2023″“commonly mention cryptocurrencies and blockchain,” Indiana University researchers found.
The study noted that botnets like Fox8 have historically been very obvious, traditionally posting unconvincing content and tweeting unnatural language.
However, advances in language models, specifically ChatGPT, have made accounts within Fox8 increasingly difficult to detect by “significantly improving the bots’ capabilities across all dimensions.”