DISINFORMATION 'INFECTS' AI CHATBOTS

A sprawling Russian disinformation network is manipulating Western AI chatbots to spew pro-Kremlin propaganda, researchers revealed recently. The Pravda network, a well-resourced Moscow-based operation to spread pro-Russian narratives globally, is said to be distorting the output of chatbots by flooding large language models (LLM) with pro-Kremlin falsehoods.

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A study of 10 leading AI chatbots by the disinformation watchdog NewsGuard found that they repeated falsehoods from the Pravda network more than 33 percent of the time, advancing a pro-Moscow agenda.

The findings underscore how the threat goes beyond generative AI models picking up disinformation circulating on the web, and involves the deliberate targeting of chatbots to reach a wider audience in a manipulation tactic that researchers call "LLM grooming."

"Massive amounts of Russian propaganda – 3,600,000 articles in 2024 – are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda," NewsGuard researchers McKenzie Sadeghi and Isis Blachez wrote in a report.

In a separate study, the nonprofit American Sunlight Project warned of the growing reach of the Pravda network – sometimes also known as "Portal Kombat" – and the likelihood that its pro-Russian content was flooding the training data of large language models.