According to reports, OpenAI has uncovered evidence that a Chinese security operation had built an artificial intelligence-powered surveillance tool to gather real-time reports about anti-Chinese posts on social media services in Western countries.

Researchers at the business said they discovered this new campaign, which they named Peer Review because a tool developer utilized OpenAI's technology to troubleshoot part of the tool's underlying computer code.

Ben Nimmo, a principal investigator for OpenAI, said this was the first time the company had uncovered an AI-powered surveillance tool of this kind.

"Threat actors sometimes give us a glimpse of what they are doing in other parts of the internet because of the way they use our AI models," Nimmo says.

Concerns about AI's potential for harmful uses, such as computer hacking, disinformation campaigns, and spying, have grown. While experts like Nimmo acknowledge that technology can undoubtedly facilitate such acts, they equally point out that AI can assist in detecting and preventing such behavior.

According to Nimmo and his team, the Chinese spying tool is based on Llama, an AI system developed by Meta that made its work publicly available to software developers worldwide.

OpenAI says it had uncovered a separate Chinese campaign, called Sponsored Discontent that used OpenAI's technologies to generate English-language posts that criticized Chinese dissidents.

The same group, OpenAI said, has used the company's technologies to translate articles into Spanish before distributing them in Latin America. The writings were critical of American politics and society.

According to reports, OpenAI researchers also discovered a campaign that was allegedly based in Cambodia and used the company's capabilities to create and translate social media comments that supported a hoax called pig butchering. Men were courted online and lured into an investment scheme using AI-generated comments.