Rippleâs chief technology officer has responded to a conspiracy theory fabricated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT, which alleges the XRP Ledger (XRPL) is somehow being secretly controlled by Ripple.
According to a Dec. 3 Twitter thread by user Stefan Huber, when asked a series of questions regarding the decentralization of Rippleâs XRP Ledger, the ChatGPT bot suggested that while people could participate in the governance of the blockchain, Ripple has the âultimate controlâ of XRPL.
Asked how this is possible without the consensus of participants and its publicly-available code, the AI alleged that Ripple may have âabilities that are not fully disclosed in the public source code.â
At one point, the AI said âthe ultimate decision-making powerâ for XRPL âstill lies with Ripple Labsâ and the company could make changes âeven if those changes do not have the support of the supermajority of the participants in the network.â
It also contrasted the XRPL with Bitcoin BTC saying the latter was âtruly decentralized.â
However, Ripple CTO David Schwartz has called the botâs logic into question, arguing that with that logic, Ripple could secretly control the Bitcoin network as it neither can be determined from the code.
The bot was also shown to contradict its own statements in the interaction, stating that the main reason for using âa distributed ledger like the [XRPL] is to enable secure and efficient transactions without the need for a central authority,â which contradicts its statement that the XRPL is managed centrally.
ChatGPT is a chatbot tool built by AI research company OpenAI which is designed to interact âin a conversational wayâ and answer questions about almost anything a user asks. It can even complete some tasks such as creating and testing smart contracts.
The AI was trained on âvast amounts of data from the internet written by humans, including conversationsâ according to OpenAI and warned because of this some of the bot's reponses can be âinaccurate, untruthful, and otherwise misleading at times.â
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said upon its release on Nov. 30 that its âan early demoâ and is âvery much a research release.â The tool has already seen over one million users according to a Dec. 5 tweet by Altman.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin also weighed in on the AI chatbot in a Dec. 4 tweet saying the idea that AI âwill be free from human biases has probably died the hardest.â