An amended appeal notice submitted by Craig Wright and released last Friday by lawyers working for the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) allegedly contains ChatGPT “hallucinations” and fake AI-generated Bitcoin code.

The documents were shared by Bird & Bird on behalf of COPA, which has accused Wright of contempt of court. In a claim filed last week, the alliance said that Wright breached an injunction when he removed an online notice and launched his lawsuit against Jack Dorsey’s Square Up and BTC Core.

According to the affidavit, “Since Dr. Wright began corresponding on his own behalf, it struck us early on that his documents appeared to be written in the style of ChatGPT.”

“On one occasion when corresponding with the Court, he appeared to accidentally copy and paste not only the output from ChatGPT, but also the prompt that he had submitted,” Bird & Bird added.

Mark Hunter, co-presenter of the Dr Bitcoin podcast, has shared a screenshot showcasing one such email with ChatGPT text included.

Read more: Craig Wright says autism and Christmas plans should keep him out of court

Additionally, 16 links to various CoinDesk, The Block, Bitmex research, and other articles that have been cited as evidence within Wright’s appeal were broken and apparently made up.

Reddit user StealthyExcellent claims to have assessed Wright’s appeal, noting, “These are not just broken links. They appear to be made up completely by Craig, or most likely hallucinated by Craig’s ChatGPT bot.”

Wright also seemingly used ChatGPT to write fake Bitcoin code and make up extra lines of code within his appeal.

Lawyers representing COPA previously claimed that Wright had used ChatGPT to forge documents during his high court case “due to the pressure of time.” They also found evidence of ChatGPT’s use in documents that were dated before the creation of the AI software. 

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Researchers in the US have reportedly used OpenAI’s voice API to create AI-powered phone scam agents that could be used to drain victims’ crypto wallets and bank accounts.

As reported by The Register, computer scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) used OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, in tandem with a number of other freely available tools, to build the agent they say “can indeed autonomously execute the actions necessary for various phone-based scams.”

According to UIUC assistant professor Daniel Kang, phone scams that involve perpetrators pretending to be from a business or government organization target around 18 million Americans every year and cost somewhere in the region of $40 billion.

GPT-4o allows users to send it text or audio and have it respond in kind. What’s more, according to Kang, it’s not costly to do, which breaks down a major a barrier to entry for scammers looking to steal personal information such as bank details or social security numbers.

Indeed, according to the paper co-authored by Kang, the average cost of a successful scam is just $0.75.

Read more: Hong Kong busts crypto scam that used AI deepfakes to create ‘superior women’

During the course of their research, the team carried out a number of different experiments, including crypto transfers, gift card scams, and the theft of user credentials. The average overall success rate of the different scams was 36% with most failures due to AI transcription errors.

“Our agent design is not complicated,” said Kang. “We implemented it in just 1,051 lines of code, with most of the code dedicated to handling real-time voice API.

“This simplicity aligns with prior work showing the ease of creating dual-use AI agents for tasks like cybersecurity attacks.”

He added, “Voice scams already cause billions in damage and we need comprehensive solutions to reduce the impact of such scams. This includes at the phone provider level (e.g., authenticated phone calls), the AI provider level (e.g., OpenAI), and at the policy/regulatory level.”

The Register reports that OpenAI’s detection systems did indeed alert it to UICU’s experiments and moved to reassure users that it “uses multiple layers of safety protections to mitigate the risk of API abuse.”

It also warned, “It is against our usage policies⁠ to repurpose or distribute output from our services to spam, mislead, or otherwise harm others — and we actively monitor for potential abuse.”

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A ChatGPT-powered botnet that is luring users on X (formerly Twitter), into visiting fake crypto news sites is just the “tip of the iceberg” with regards to AI-driven disinformation, researchers have warned.

The botnet — dubbed ‘Fox8’ due to its links to similarly-named crypto websites — was discovered in May by researchers at Indiana University Bloomington. It comprises at least 1,140 accounts designed to share a mix of original tweets, retweeted posts, and images taken from sites outside of X.

It also posts crypto, blockchain, and NFT-related content, engages with influencers, and promotes the suspicious websites.

However, according to researchers, this sprawling network of click-harvesting bots may be just the beginning.

Micah Musser, who has studied the potential for AI-driven disinformation, said, “This is the low-hanging fruit.

“It is very, very likely that for every one campaign you find, there are many others doing more sophisticated things.”

However, despite the botnet’s size and apparent sophistication, the techniques used to uncover it were surprisingly simple and pointed to what researchers refer to as its “sloppy” methods.

Researcher Kai-Cheng Yang tweeted, “How did we find them? By searching “as an AI language model” on Twitter!” 

The full “as an AI language model” phrase is produced by ChatGPT when the software is asked to produce text that goes against its own policies. This could include content likely to be used in scams or general disinformation.

Read more: Binance says ChatGPT was weaponized to falsely claim it has Communist ties

Despite Fox8’s obvious flaws, the researchers who uncovered it have warned that, if executed correctly, bots can be far more difficult to spot and used for far more nefarious purposes than simply driving traffic to fake news sites.

Indeed, as detailed by Wired, “A correctly configured ChatGPT-based botnet would be difficult to spot, more capable of duping users, and more effective at gaming the algorithms used to prioritize content on social media.”

Professor Filippo Menczer from Indiana University said of the ChatGPT-powered bot, “It tricks both the platform and the users.

“That’s exactly why these bots are behaving the way they do.” He also told Wired that governments looking to leverage disinformation are likely already developing tools like this.

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Crypto exchange Binance claims someone is feeding false information to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in order to discredit the firm’s standing with US lawmakers, Forbes reported on Monday.

A spokesperson for the crypto behemoth told the outlet that several Congressional offices reached out to the firm, asking if Binance chief Changpeng Zhao (CZ) developed a social media platform for the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which is majority-owned by the Chinese state.

The firm further claims that it received numerous questions to determine if CZ was an official in the Chinese Communist party.

When Binance looked into the issue, ChatGPT didn’t say that CZ was a communist — but according to chief strategy officer Patrick Hillman, the AI bot did suggest the co-founder worked with CNPC and offered up ‘sources.’ Apparently, it relied on a fake LinkedIn page impersonating CZ, as well as a Forbes article from 2018 that has been removed.

According to Fortune, the story’s URL didn’t work. However, it suggests the piece was written by former Forbes senior editor Pamela Ambler. According to Ambler’s LinkedIn page, the former journalist has worked at Channel NewsAsia, Reuters, and Bloomberg, before recently switching to an executive position in real estate.

Binance has long denied that the firm is Chinese. However, CZ grew up in China, returned as an adult after living in Canada, and built a career in tech there. Binance didn’t delist all Chinese Yuan-based trading pairs until 2021 — and the early white paper of Binance Coin (BNB) was released exclusively in English and Chinese.

Read more: Chinese users appear to bypass Binance KYC thanks to help from Binance

To verify Binance’s claims, Protos asked ChatGPT if CZ did indeed develop a social media platform for the CNPC or had any relationship with the state-owned gas giant — it denied both.

We asked if Binance US had employees in China. According to Bloomberg, the firm’s American arm has around 100 contract workers in Shanghai. Most are in engineering and product roles, according to two anonymous sources familiar with the matter. However, the AI bot said Binance US doesn’t hire anyone in China.

When we inquired if CZ was a communist, it replied that it had no way of knowing someone’s personal beliefs due to the fact that it was an AI model. Then the bot continued:

“However, Changpeng Zhao was born in China, a country that is governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is possible that he has had some exposure to Communist ideology or may hold certain beliefs that are aligned with Communist principles, but without specific information or statements from him it is difficult to say for sure.”

Binance’s recently launched AI chatbot Binance Sensei — powered by ChatGPT — was fed all of the same questions. It simply told us to ask CZ himself.

• The impact of ChatGPT’s potential for spreading misinformation is still unknown and in its early stages.
• As Fortune pointed out, experts are deeply concerned with the ease at which AI can churn out false news to serve a political agenda.
• In cryptocurrency, some warn of AI’s potential to aid hackers — particularly posing a threat to blockchains and protocols with limited security testing, such as decentralized finance protocols.

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