{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/anatomy-of-an-ai-powered-malicious-social","title":"Anatomy of an AI-powered malicious social botnet","arxiv_id":"2307.16336","date":"2023-07-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kai-Cheng Yang","Filippo Menczer"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in generating realistic text across diverse subjects. Concerns have been raised that they could be utilized to produce fake content with a deceptive intention, although evidence thus far remains anecdotal. This paper presents a case study about a Twitter botnet that appears to employ ChatGPT to generate human-like content. Through heuristics, we identify 1,140 accounts and validate them via manual annotation. These accounts form a dense cluster of fake personas that exhibit similar behaviors, including posting machine-generated content and stolen images, and engage with each other through replies and retweets. ChatGPT-generated content promotes suspicious websites and spreads harmful comments. While the accounts in the AI botnet can be detected through their coordination patterns, current state-of-the-art LLM content classifiers fail to discriminate between them and human accounts in the wild. These findings highlight the threats posed by AI-enabled social bots.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16336v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.16336v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"anatomy-of-an-ai-powered-malicious-social","repo_url":"https://github.com/osome-iu/aibot_fox8","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"anatomy","task_name":"Anatomy"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"fail","method_name":"fail"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2307.16336","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}