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

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

“Admiring the commitment of Dr. Bawumia to transform Ghana,” says an September AI bot post. “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 have names like “Glenn Washington,” “Netflix Series & Movies” and “Patriot” — also disparage John Mahama, the presidential candidate of the rival left-wing National party Democratic. Congress. These posts often use hashtags like #mahamaisaliar and #DrunkmaniMahama, accusing Mahama of being a drunkard. (Mahama denied this.)

“The main objective of the network appears to be amplifying pro-NPP messages, promoting the Bawumia administration and targeting the opposition National Democratic Congress,” McKenzie Sadeghi, AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, who contributed to the research. said The rest of the world.

Dimitris Dimitriadis, NewsGuard’s director of research and development, said in an interview with The rest of the world that bot accounts tend to post at “regular” and “predictable” intervals, often ten or more times a day. He said the accounts — which tend to be active between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. in Ghana — mostly receive likes and reposts from others in the bot network. These regimented patterns in time and style alerted researchers that the accounts might be fake.

NewsGuard’s research team fed all 171 posts from the accounts into a tool from Pangram Labs, which assesses the likelihood that the text was 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 pursued a number of cases of manipulative behavior on X,” Dimitriadis said.

Moderation of X’s content 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% reliability and safety engineers, who identified and eliminated foreign influence campaigns. X later cut half of its electoral integrity unitonly weeks after CEO Linda Yaccarino promised to expand it. A Report 2023 from the European Unit claimed that under Musk’s leadership, the volume of misinformation and disinformation posts has exploded compared to other social media platforms.

The lack of oversight of the platform created openings for networks of political influence. With tools like ChatGPT, these networks can create new content on social networks at scale without shutting them down. “AI appears to be increasingly being used by bad actors trying to influence elections or influence democratic outcomes,” Dimitriadis said. The rest of the world.

Sadeghi said NewsGuard has seen many changes on X since Musk took the reins.

“We found that users checking in on X account for some of the most viral false or unsubstantiated claims,” Sadeghi said. “The blue check allows misinformation to appear higher and more prominent on the platform, which has proven to be an advantage for bad actors.”

She added that she recent NewsGuard survey found that a quarter of X users who responded believed that users with blue checks were more trustworthy than those without.

This year is a politically vulnerable time in Ghana. Eight people were killed in Ghana during the last election cycle of 2020, according to the US State Department. Two of the murders were committed by civilians, and two others were committed by military and police officers from the country’s electoral security task force.

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

NewsGuard shared the results of their research 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 The rest of the world.

OpenAI has expressed concern about people using ChatGPT to generate content that influences political discourse. According to an OpenAI report released in Octoberinfluencers used ChatGPT to make political social media posts and blog posts “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 to the country’s political discourse, Dimitriadis said, because all the hashtags and talking points in the network’s posts were already popular. He added that it is “inherently difficult” to gauge how much impact these accounts have had on Ghana’s political discourse.

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