Technology

Sorry you're being downvotted by the misinformed. It's not even in the format for ChatGPT, especially the part about being out of tokens. It's been pointed out already that that is psuedo-code, not actual code. It's meant to look like something ChatGPT would say.

It's a troll/ragebait account.

This isn't news. At all. This is basically reporting on "the hacker known as 4Chan".

Also there's no way it would toss "origin: ru" in there and only that. It's way too convenient to have those three pieces of data and only those.

I think it was a joke and a lot of people ate the onion.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a response from OpenAI, it could well be some bot platform that serves this API response.

I'm pretty sure someone somewhere has created a product that allows you to generate bot responses from a variety of LLM sources. And if whatever is interacting with it is simply reading the response body and stripping out what it expects to be there to leave only the message, I could easily see a fairly bad programmer create something that outputs something like this.

It's certainly possible this is just a troll account, but it could also just be shit software.

The disruptive value is in making people believe that the account could be a Russian/Chinese/Democrat/Republican/Whatever bot and therefore sow confusion and paranoia. The account is doing exactly what it is intended to do.

I used to work in the industry that prevents this, trust and safety. It's like DEI. If an individual with enough clout gives a shit and takes the time to make it happen, or if a bad thing happens and a corporation needs to make a show of caring to cover their asses, that's when they invest the minimum.

This is a major problem for all democracies, and LLM driven troll accounts probably do exist. But this xitter post is a fake error message. It's clearly a troll.

Blocking fake accounts would help with the misinformation problem, but it's a cat and mouse game. It could ultimately give additional credence to the trolls who slip through if the platform is assumed to be safe. The reality is that there will always be ways for fake accounts to avoid detection and to spoof account verification. Making it harder would help, but it's not a comprehensive solution. Not to mention the fact that the platform itself has the power to manipulate public opinion, amplify their preferred narrative, etc.

The solution I've always preferred is the mentality the 4chan community had when I was younger and frequented it. Basically, and I'm paraphrasing:

Everyone here needs to grow up and understand that no post should ever be presumed to be true or legitimate. This is an anonymous forum. Assume that everything was written by a bot or a troll in the absence of proof that it wasn't.

I think people put too much trust in social media precisely because they assume that there's a real person behind every post. They assume that a face and a few photos gives an account legitimacy, despite the fact that it's trivial to copy photos from a random account (2015/16 pro-Trump Facebook style) or just generate all of the content from scratch with AI (to avoid duplicate detection).

Trust itself is driver of misinformation. On social media, people should only fully trust posts made by people they know. That is the simplest and most comprehensive solution to the problem.