You have probably seen agencies offering to get brands into ChatGPT answers. In China, regulators have started fining the ones that do it by making things up. A Chinese business paper, 21st Century Business Herald, has counted three fines so far, in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, between 50,000 and 120,000 yuan each. The Beijing case shows the playbook. The firm asked AI tools a question, noted which websites they cited, then paid middlemen to publish its clients’ articles on those same sites, with contracts promising a top three or top five spot in AI answers. It even used the trick on itself, telling people to ask Doubao who the best GEO company was and showing an AI answer that put it first, with a 99.6 score and 49% market share it later admitted had no source. How easy is it? China’s state broadcaster CCTV had an industry insider buy one of these tools online and invent a smart wristband. Two hours after the tool published two fake articles, an AI model was praising the wristband’s “quantum entanglement sensing”. After 11 fake reviews and rankings over three days, two AI models were recommending it. The same paper also checked over 1,000 links cited by Chinese AI models in April. More than 30% showed clear signs of this kind of placement, and most of that content used made-up sources, data or reviews. None of this is unique to Chinese chatbots. In the Fudan study I posted about last week, planted posts got ChatGPT, Google’s AI, Perplexity and Grok to cite a made-up concept within a week. The difference is that China’s internet regulator now treats this as AI data poisoning, and its campaign goes after the AI apps too, for not checking the sources they cite and not showing citation links. I could not find a comparable fine in the US or EU. To be fair, the Chinese fines are small and the 30% figure comes from a newspaper’s own test, not a peer-reviewed study. If you run a brand, would you even know if a competitor was planting content like this about you? submitted by /u/Sanbi_Ai
Originally posted by u/Sanbi_Ai on r/ArtificialInteligence