OpenAI is quietly waging its personal model of authorized ethics enforcement — and the goal isn’t legal professionals or regulation companies, it’s ChatGPT accounts masquerading as them.
In response to reporting by Legal Cheek, OpenAI has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts tied to bogus regulation companies and pretend “legal professionals” operating scam-recovery schemes, aka Operation False Witness.
The playbook is acquainted: polished web sites, convincing lawyer bios, legal-sounding emails, guarantees to get well stolen funds — after which requests for upfront charges, usually in crypto. The twist? AI helped generate the skilled gloss, from agency profiles to consumer communications, making the operations look way more respectable than your common web rip-off. Listed here are some extra particulars:
OpenAI says the community promoted a minimum of six supposed regulation companies. In some situations, it claims the fraudsters went additional, impersonating actual legal professionals and even regulation enforcement our bodies. Accounts have been used to translate messages, rewrite communications into “American English”, produce textual content “within the model of a lawyer” and even generate pretend supporting paperwork.
The tech big says it is going to proceed to disrupt malicious makes use of of its fashions and ban accounts linked to scams and impersonation.
OpenAI eradicating the accounts is nice, however the bigger difficulty for the authorized trade is apparent: when AI can effortlessly produce credible-sounding authorized content material, the barrier to operating a pretend agency drops dramatically.
Innovation is nice. Pretend legal professionals powered by machine studying? Much less so.
OpenAI bans ChatGPT accounts linked to fake law firms and lawyers [Legal Cheek]
Staci Zaretsky is the managing editor of Above the Regulation, the place she’s labored since 2011. She’d love to listen to from you, so please be happy to email her with any suggestions, questions, feedback, or critiques. You may comply with her on Bluesky, X/Twitter, and Threads, or join along with her on LinkedIn.
