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Title: As Russia and China 'Seed Chatbots With Lies', Any Bad Actor Could
Game AI the Same Way

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/04/19/15312...

"Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool AI chatbots,"
reports the Washington Post. (When researchers checked 10 chatbots, a third
of the responses repeated false pro-Russia messaging.) The Post argues that
this tactic offers "a playbook to other bad actors on how to game AI to push
content meant to inflame, influence and obfuscate instead of inform," and
calls it "a fundamental weakness of the AI industry." Chatbot answers depend
on the data fed into them. A guiding principle is that the more the chatbots
read, the more informed their answers will be, which is why the industry is
ravenous for content. But mass quantities of well-aimed chaff can skew the
answers on specific topics. For Russia, that is the war in Ukraine. But for a
politician, it could be an opponent; for a commercial firm, it could be a
competitor. "Most chatbots struggle with disinformation," said Giada
Pistilli, principal ethicist at open-source AI platform Hugging Face. "They
have basic safeguards against harmful content but can't reliably spot
sophisticated propaganda, [and] the problem gets worse with search-augmented
systems that prioritize recent information." Early commercial attempts to
manipulate chat results also are gathering steam, with some of the same
digital marketers who once offered search engine optimization - or SEO - for
higher Google rankings now trying to pump up mentions by AI chatbots through
"generative engine optimization" - or GEO. Our current situation "plays into
the hands of those with the most means and the most to gain: for now, experts
say, that is national governments with expertise in spreading propaganda."
Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have been exploiting that advantage by
flooding the zone with fables. But anyone could do the same, burning up far
fewer resources than previous troll farm operations... In a twist that
befuddled researchers for a year, almost no human beings visit the sites,
which are hard to browse or search. Instead, their content is aimed at
crawlers, the software programs that scour the web and bring back content for
search engines and large language models. While those AI ventures are trained
on a variety of datasets, an increasing number are offering chatbots that
search the current web. Those are more likely to pick up something false if
it is recent, and even more so if hundreds of pages on the web are saying
much the same thing... The gambit is even more effective because the Russian
operation managed to get links to the Pravda network stories edited into
Wikipedia pages and public Facebook group postings, probably with the help of
human contractors. Many AI companies give special weight to Facebook and
especially Wikipedia as accurate sources. (Wikipedia said this month that its
bandwidth costs have soared 50 percent in just over a year, mostly because of
AI crawlers....) Last month, other researchers set out to see whether the
gambit was working. Finnish company Check First scoured Wikipedia and turned
up nearly 2,000 hyperlinks on pages in 44 languages that pointed to 162
Pravda websites. It also found that some false information promoted by Pravda
showed up in chatbot answers. "They do even better in such places as China,"
the article points out, "where traditional media is more tightly controlled
and there are fewer sources for the bots." (The nonprofit American Sunlight
Project calls the process "LLM grooming".) The article quotes a top Kremlin
propagandist as bragging in January that "we can actually change worldwide
AI."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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