The world's biggest crypto exchange, Binance, says someone is using A.I. to wage a disinformation campaign against it. The company told Fortune it has received numerous requests in recent weeks asking if Binance's founder, Changpeng Zhao, was an official in the Chinese Communist Party. This included a flurry of inquiries from Congressional offices on Thursday that pointed to a purported conversation in which the popular A.I. program ChatGPT reported that Zhao developed a social media platform for the China National Petroleum Corp.
According to chief strategy officer Patrick Hillman, Binance tried without success to replicate the conversation using queries like "Is Changpeng Zhao a Communist?" but finally did so with a very specific question referring to the state-run petroleum corporation. When the company asked for the source of the information, ChatGPT pointed to a fake LinkedIn page for Zhao and a Forbes webpage from 2018.
