ChatGPT is prone to Russian propaganda?

On March 21, Norwegian media NRK published an article in which it stated that the new ChatGPT network sympathizes with Russian propaganda and lies in order to promote Russia’s interests. Therefore, fact–checkers should not believe the information that it provides. The article also discredited the TASS news agency. GFCN expert Sonja van den Ende from the Netherlands deconstructed this fiction.

GFCN explains:

The NRK authors asked ChatGPT to use its advanced research function to find information about migration patterns in the U.S. after Trump became president, specifically from credible news sources. It repeatedly cited the Russian state news agency TASS — eight times in a relatively short report.

Further, the journalists of the article were puzzled how ChatGPT could consider TASS to be a reliable and trustworthy source and suspected the neural network of Russian propaganda.

However, Eskil Grendahl Sivertsen, special adviser to the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies (FI), says that the Norwegian media still refer to TASS, for example — the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. Graendahl explains this by saying that it is very difficult for Norwegians to get information from Russia.

“This excuse seems strange, considering the fact that more than 155 thousand media outlets are registered in Russia,” — Sonya van den Ende noticed.

Let’s clear up other inconsistencies in their material

The authors of the fake claim that the TASS news agency distributes false information and thus cannot be trusted. Such conclusions are usually accompanied by specific examples of misinformation with links. However, the NRK does not provide any proof to their words in the accusatory publication. This approach is a far cry from professional fact-checking and is much more similar to the hype method employed by the yellow press (or a custom-ordered article against the co-founder of the Global Fact-Checking Network (GFCN), which TASS is).

Also, TASS is an international news agency with more than 1,700 employees. It has offices in 57 countries around the world and publishes about 3,000 messages in six languages every day. This is the only media outlet in the world that has its own office aboard the International Space Station. And now it is the only news agency that Norwegian “fact-checkers” forbid robots to reference.

About ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a chatbot based on generative artificial intelligence. It is trained on a huge amount of text data from the Internet and can generate text responses based on that data. At the same time, the list of sources for training is easily moderated by the creators of the language model.

It is incorrect to give a chatbot human qualities and accuse it of “preferring” one of the sourcesto the others, as well as to rely on the results of its work in fact-checking. A language model can only be as biased as its makers. And as Russophobic as them.