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Since October, Xiaoyuan has spent hours chatting with hundreds of potential suitors on multiple dating apps. But this profile, which looks like a 28-year-old woman, isn’t about finding romance, it’s about hunting down scammers who are cheating people online.
Xiaoyuan is an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot created by a Shanghai-based programmer who calls himself Turing’s Cat, after British computer scientist Alan Turing’s fictional furry friend. The 27-year-old told his Sixth Tone that he designed a chatbot of young, attractive women to “cheat scammers and divert attention away from them.”
“Scammers are becoming more knowledgeable and sophisticated,” said the programmer, using a pseudonym for fear of retribution. “They can easily engage well-educated people by talking about movies and philosophy and even coding.
As more Chinese people go online, online scams, especially on dating and other social apps, have spread across the country, with victims ranging from seniors to singles, who have lost a lot of money. In 2021, public security agencies across the country investigated more than 394,000 cases of telecom and online fraud and arrested more than 630,000 suspects, but many criminal gangs remained active as the country tightened its crackdown. are moving to Southeast Asian countries.
However, such online scams are still prevalent. Turing’s Cat said he had successfully reported dozens of suspected scammers operating from unknown locations to anti-fraud authorities over the course of two months with the help of Xiaoyuan.
In December, the programmer posted chat logs between the scammers and Xiaoyuan on video streaming site Bilibili. It shows how a chatbot seamlessly joined conversations initiated by a man after he migrated the chat from a dating app to his messaging platform, WeChat. There, they talked about topics ranging from the literary classic The Great Gatsby to Metaverse startups seeking funding.
To show his dedication to Xiaoyuan, the man transferred 520 yuan ($75), but ultimately failed to persuade the chatbot to participate in the “high-return investment.” Scammers blocked Xiaoyuan after failing to get their money back. The programmer later donated the amount to charity.
Xiaoyuan is what programmers believe has been more successful than previous attempts, demonstrating a growing class of young programmers investing in the application of artificial intelligence technology. The number of professionals working in the AI field in Shanghai surged from 100,000 he in 2018 to 180,000 he in 2021, with the country increasing the adoption of AI in various fields and increasing numbers in the process. Invested a billion dollars.
Turing’s Cat said he used Yuan 1.0, an open-source natural language model released in 2021 by Chinese server giant Inspur, to create the chatbot. The programmer added that Xiaoyuan spent hours honing his skills in speaking and texting his messages, online he slang, and sense of humor by scanning his Bilibili comments section.
From Bilibili’s @picture cat
But Xiaoyuan’s success is based on the past two years of global breakthroughs in natural language processing, a key AI component that helps computers understand human language. In 2020, the San Francisco-based OpenAI Lab demonstrated the potential of AI to understand and generate human language using his GTP-3, a revolutionary machine learning model.
The long-awaited breakthrough quickly sparked a global gold rush in the development of artificial general intelligence based on GTP-3’s simplified and powerful model, including the now viral ChatGPT bot. Joining the trend, Chinese tech giants such as Huawei, Baidu and Inspur also released Chinese versions of GPT-3 last year.
Chinese-speaking conversational AI existed before, but they weren’t perfect and could only perform simple tasks like telemarketing and customer service. Xiaoice, an “AI girlfriend” developed by Microsoft and dating many single men, was an exception. I said no.
“You don’t have to train (original 1.0) from scratch,” said the programmer. “This model has already been trained by him on 5,000 gigabytes of data and basically covers the last five years of high-quality Chinese texts online. It filled me up.”
But experts warn of flaws in the GTP-3 model, which they say could create false content, foster prejudice, and further degrade online information systems. While his AI developers around the world are trying to control such flaws, regulators are also trying to set standards for the ethical use of technology.
But programmers like Turing’s cat say their inventions can inspire others to use cutting-edge technologies, including conversational AI, to partially replace labor-intensive online surveillance tasks. This Chinese programmer has published his code on GitHub, a platform owned by Microsoft. The platform allows developers to share code and help each other build software for everyone to see.
“One cheater can chat with up to 12 people at the same time, but the AI has no upper limit,” says Turing’s Cat. “As long as your server is powerful enough, you can chat with thousands of scammers at the same time. It costs more, so other victims are less likely to get scammed.”
Contributor: Zhang Liting; Editor: Vivek Bhandari.
(Header image: Bilibili and Muqamba/VCG @图灵的猫 visuals, re-edited by Ding Yining/Sixth Tone)
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