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Title: Foreign propagandists continue using ChatGPT in influence campaigns

Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2025 16:15:09 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/ai/foreign-propagand...

Chinese propaganda and social engineering operations have been using ChatGPT
to create posts, comments and drive engagement at home and abroad. OpenAI
said it has recently disrupted four Chinese covert influence operations that
were using its tool to generate social media posts and replies on platforms
including TikTok, Facebook, Reddit and X.

The comments generated revolved around several topics from US politics to a
Taiwanese video game where players fight the Chinese Communist Party. ChatGPT
was used to create social media posts that both supported and decried
different hot button issues to stir up misleading political discourse.

Ben Nimmo, principal investigator at OpenAI told NPR, "what we're seeing from
China is a growing range of covert operations using a growing range of
tactics." While OpenAI claimed it also disrupted a handful of operations it
believes originated in Russia, Iran and North Korea, Nimmo elaborated on the
Chinese operations saying they "targeted many different countries and topics
[...] some of them combined elements of influence operations, social
engineering, surveillance."

This is far from the first time this has occurred. In 2023, researchers from
cybersecurity firm Mandiant found that AI-generated content has been used in
politically motivated online influence campaigns in numerous instances since
2019.

In 2024, OpenAI published a blog post outlining its efforts to disrupt five
state-affiliated operations across China, Iran and North Korea that were
using OpenAI models for malicious intent. These applications included
debugging code, generating scripts and creating content for use in phishing
campaigns.

That same year, OpenAI said it disrupted an Iranian operation that was using
ChatGPT to create longform political articles about US elections that were
then posted on fake news sites posing as both conservative and progressive
outlets. The operation was also creating comments to post on X and Instagram
through fake accounts, again espousing opposing points of view.

"We didn't generally see these operations getting more engagement because of
their use of AI," Nimmo told NPR. "For these operations, better tools don't
necessarily mean better outcomes."

This offers little comfort. As generative AI gets cheaper and smarter, it
stands to reason that its ability to generate content en masse will make
influence campaigns like these easier and more affordable to build, even if
their efficacy remains unchanged.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/ai/foreign-propagand...
influence-campaigns-161509862.html?src=rss

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