AI Propaganda Will Be Effective and Easily Accessible

The capacity of AI tools has grown in tandem with the potential threats they pose to our information space, says Max Rizzuto, a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). Source In a Truth Social post on March 18, 2023, former US President Donald Trump wrote that he expected to be arrested the following Tuesday. A week of frantic chatter in mainstream and social media ensued, anticipating what might happen next. During this information void, AI-generated images envisioning the former president’s arrest circulated widely, titillating Trump’s opponents while enraging many of his supporters. On March 31, a Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump over a hush payment made just before the 2016 election, and he was arraigned before the court on Tuesday, April 4. Before the indictment, one set of AI-generated images, created using Midjourney and shared on Twitter by Bellingcat open-source researcher Eliot Higgins on March 20, accrued millions of views, spreading to other social platforms and multiple news websites. The circumstances of the images’ extraordinary virality and the contentious political and cultural nature of their subject matter could serve as a bellwether for the future of malign propaganda applications involving AI-generated images and other forms of synthetic media. In December 2017, some of the first examples of weaponized AI-derived media surfaced in the form of AI pornography. In “deepfake” videos, AI-enabled face-swaps portrayed the likenesses of non-consenting celebrities in sexually explicit scenes. These artifacts were synthesized with publicly available datasets and run on consumer-grade hardware…AI Propaganda Will Be Effective and Easily Accessible