As Twitter continues to circle the drain fuelled by chaos from CEO Elon Musk, one user noticed something peculiar about tweet replies. After digging a little deeper, user Pieter Levels — who goes by @levelsio on the platform — found that bots are apparently now using the popular text-generating AI ChatGPT to reply to tweets.
It all started with a tweet at 8:56 a.m., where Levels jokes about his nomadic friends using a typical two line meme format. Seven minutes later, Levels received a reply from an account with a display name Pragyan Tripathi, who calls himself a developer, educator, and founder, while boasting over ten years in the tech industry. Tripathi replied to Levels:
It’s interesting to see how the lifestyles of nomadic individuals have changed over time.
Whether you enjoy trying new foods and experiences or prefer to stick to familiar routines, the most important thing is to have fun and make the most of your travels.
It’s a seemingly innocuous and coherent reply to Levels’ tweet, until Levels says he started to dig a little deeper based on a suspicion that the reply may not have been generated by a human. “I had a gut feeling but now I proved it,” Levels tweeted shortly after receiving the reply from Tripathi. “People now have A.I. bots running that use ChatGPT to automatically reply to people’s tweets.”
According to Levels’ tweets that document his workflow, he instructed ChatGPT to write a reply to his tweet about his nomadic friends, and the AI spat out a piece of text that was very similar to Tripathi’s reply. Levels also said he believed that all of the tweets on Tripathi’s account were generated using ChatGPT.
Tripathi responded to Levels’ initial claim on Twitter, confirming that his reply was generated using AI. “Have been playing around with ChatGPT + Twitter API automation lately,” Tripathi wrote. When Gizmodo asked Tripathi about Level’s accusation that his entire account was generated using AI, Tripathi denied that claim. Tripathi wasn’t able to estimate exactly how many of his tweets were generated using AI.
Levels did not immediately reply to Gizmodo’s request for comment on this story.
ChatGPT opened to the public just last month, and has already caused quite a stir on the Internet. While other text-based AI generator’s have been around for a while, ChatGPT isn’t just able to generate a coherent sentence, but instead has the ability to string together paragraphs of information that can logically convey a single point — something previous AI has lacked. ChatGPT even wrote its own Gizmodo article. As Ethan Mollick wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “[t]his is a very big deal,” and those who are able to capitalise on this tipping point will have a significant tool in their toolbox.