Propagandists Exploit AI to Spread Influence, Platforms Must Act

Propagandists Are Using AI Too—and Companies Need to Be Open About It

At the end of May, OpenAI reported a significant development in its corporate history – the disclosure that bad actors had misused its products to run influence operations. The company had detected five networks of covert propagandists from Russia, China, Iran, and Israel using OpenAI’s generative AI tools to create large volumes of social media content in multiple languages and turn news articles into Facebook posts, all with the apparent intent of improving the quality and quantity of their output.

Case in point:

• OpenAI’s report marks an important precedent, as the company has prioritized detecting and shutting down these misuse cases to mitigate their impact.
• This disclosure was evocative of a similar report from Meta, released a day earlier, which also detailed the takedown of six covert influence operations on its platform that utilized AI-generated content.

Go deeper:

• As researchers who have studied online influence operations for years, the authors note that adversarial actors are increasingly adopting generative AI technology, particularly large language models, to cheaply and easily scale up their propaganda efforts.
• Their own research has found that language models can produce text that is nearly as persuasive as human-written propaganda campaigns.

Why it matters:

• While most of the influence campaigns disclosed by OpenAI and Meta did not have much real-world impact, the use of AI tools reduces the cost of running propaganda campaigns, making it significantly cheaper to produce content and run automated accounts.
• This raises concerns about the potential for AI to disrupt American politics and become a national security threat, particularly in an election year.

The big picture:

• Transparency is paramount in addressing the growing threat of AI-powered influence operations. Platforms must continue to prioritize threat detection and expand data-sharing relationships with researchers to provide more visibility into adversarial content and behaviors.
• Online users also have a role to play, exercising skepticism and helping friends and family members become more aware of the prevalence of generated content to resist deception from propagandists and scammers.

The bottom line:
As we move into an era of AI-driven influence operations, a collaborative approach of transparency, data sharing, and vigilance is essential to develop a more resilient digital ecosystem. Propagandists are working across the internet, so we must address these shared challenges together.