The dark side of generative AI

Researchers asked chatbot programs to produce political spam. It worked

- ALEX BOYD

Fenwick McKelvey, co-director of the Applied AI Institute at Concordia University, says reams of messages can be easily conjured and used, if not to mislead voters outright, then to flood social media and sow confusion about what is true.

Whatever else it might be, writing hundreds of eerily similar messages in support of a political rally isn’t usually quick work.

So when a flurry of bot-like posts appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the wake of a Pierre Poilievre event in the small Ontario town of Kirkland Lake, it got some researchers thinking. At first, the messages — many of which featured cookie-cutter accounts who claimed to be “buzzing” with excitement — prompted political mudslinging. Both the Liberals and NDP pointed the finger at the Conservative party itself, which was quick to deny any involvement.

But for those who study artificial intelligence, the messages raised a slightly different, if related, question. They wondered not just about who created the messages, but how. It seemed a bit unlikely this was the work of a serious political party — for one thing, the messages were just too obviously inauthentic — but they’d clearly been churned out by the dozens, and fast. To test this question, researchers decided to give it a try.

“I really wanted to know, could our team use commercial, easy to access (large language models) to do this type of campaign?” said Fenwick McKelvey, an associate professor in the department of communication studies and co-director of the Applied AI Institute at Concordia University.