AI chatbots infected with Russian disinformation: Study

The world’s most popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are infected with Russian disinformation, according to a study published Thursday.  The research done by the news monitoring service NewsGuard found that the Moscow-based disinformation network dubbed Pravda — which is Russian for “truth” — has been spreading falsehoods on the internet, including attempts to influence AI chatbots and the results they spell out to users.  “By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information,” NewsGuard said in the lengthy report, adding it results in massive “amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.”  The world’s leading AI chatbots have repeated false narratives trafficked by the Pravda network 33 percent of the time, NewsGuard said in its audit.  NewsGuard stated it tested 10 prominent AI chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini. It sampled 15 false narratives that have been pushed by a network of 150 “pro-Kremlin Pravda websites” from April 2022 through last month.  The news rating service said its findings confirmed the American Sunlight Project’s February 2025 report, which warned that Pravda was set up to “flood large-language models with pro-Kremlin content.”  “The long-term risks–political, social, and technological–associated with potential LLM [large-language model] grooming within this network are high. The larger a set of pro-Russia narratives is, the more likely it is to…AI chatbots infected with Russian disinformation: Study