Russian propaganda may be influencing certain answers from AI chatbots including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Meta AI, according to a new report.
NewsGuard, a company that develops rating systems for news and information websites, claims to have found evidence that a Moscow-based network named “Pravda” is publishing false claims to affect the responses of AI models.
Pravda has flooded search results and web crawlers with pro-Russian falsehoods, publishing 3.6 million misleading articles in 2024 alone, per NewsGuard, citing statistics from the nonprofit American Sunlight Project.
NewsGuard’s analysis, which probed 10 leading chatbots, found that the chatbots collectively repeated false Russian disinformation narratives, like that the U.S. operates secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine, 33% of the time.
According to NewsGuard, the Pravda network’s effectiveness in infiltrating AI chatbot outputs can be largely attributed to its techniques, which involve search engine optimization strategies to boost the visibility of its content. This may prove to be an intractable problem for chatbots heavily reliant on web engines.
