What is Russia's covert AI influence campaign?

OpenAI's taken a pretty bold step against a bunch of ChatGPT accounts out of Russia that were pushing a fake think tank called the International Burke Institute (IBI). This IBI was linked to a website that was basically a mess of copied and misattributed academic work, plus a "sovereignty" index that - surprise, surprise - made Russia look like a hero. The people behind these accounts were using VPNs to sneak onto the ChatGPT platform, since they're not supposed to have access from Russia, and then using the AI to generate social media comments in English that didn't give away their Russian roots.

These generated comments were popping up all over the place - Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it - and were all about hyping up the IBI and its "sovereignty" index. This index was basically a propaganda tool, praising Russia and trashing Western countries. The operators were even using the AI to respond to real users' posts on Substack, and creating logos for Telegram channels focused on different countries like Germany, the USA, and France. It's pretty wild stuff.

What's really significant here is how the operators were using AI to generate all this content super quickly and easily. The whole campaign was ridiculously elaborate, with a fake think tank and all - it's not your run-of-the-mill influence operation. And the fact that they were able to use AI to create content that was often impossible to distinguish from human-written stuff? That's a major concern for future influence campaigns. As one expert might say (though none are quoted here), it's a whole new level of misinformation.

Source: OpenAI