Scientists revealed in a study last month that X, formerly known as Twitter, has a real problem with bots, with around 1,140 AI-powered accounts that “they post machine-generated content and steal selfies to create fake personas.”
The research, conducted by a team of students and faculty at the Indiana University Social Media Observatory, found a network of fake accounts on X in what they called the “Fox8” botnet, which allegedly uses ChatGPT to generate content that “aims to promote suspicious website and spread harmful content”.
Bot Accounts
Bot accounts try to convince people to invest in fake cryptocurrencies, and are even thought to steal from existing crypto wallets, discovered the scientists Kai-Cheng Yang and Filippo Menczer.
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 posts generated by AI. 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. as they traditionally posted unconvincing content and tweeted unnatural language.
However, advances in language models, specifically ChatGPT, have made accounts within Fox8 increasingly difficult to detect when “significantly improve the capabilities of bots in all dimensions.”