Dem
47
GOP
53
When new technologies come out, they often can be used for good or evil. AI is no exception and hostile foreign governments are already using it to help produce and spread disinformation. If you think the Russian interference in the 2016 election was horrendous, well, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
Russia, China, and other countries are gearing up to use AI to influence elections and inflame discord. And the AI is getting good enough that it can fool many people much of the time. That may be sufficient. You don't have to fool all of the people all of the time to have impact.
A Chinese company, GoLaxy, is using generative AI based on the Chinese AI engine DeepSeek, which is much more energy efficient than any of the models built in the U.S. It is mining social media and can create fake profiles and content that seem very authentic to many people. So when the company wants to push some (real or artificial) person to the top, it can generate likes from thousands of bots and create thousands of followers, all of whom put out perfectly reasonable-looking content. Only they don't exist. It has tested its technology in the 2024 election in Taiwan and elsewhere.
GoLaxy has created profiles for at least 117 members of Congress and 2,000 other American politicians and can automatically generate plausible content for them in excellent English, something Chinese hackers were unable to do. Traditionally Russia was better than China at this sort of thing, but with GoLaxy, China may now have leapfrogged Russia. Still, Russia is not giving up. It has been experimenting with creating fake stories that look like they originated from ABC or Politico.
So how is the U.S. responding? Donald Trump has dismantled much of what the government had in the way of cybersecurity. The FBI, State Department, and CISA have all cut down their offices that worked with industry to trade information about foreign infiltration into the U.S. It is as if Trump welcomes foreign disinformation on social media and elsewhere. That will probably work out well for him, as long as the foreign leaders like what he is doing. But if he does something they don't like (e.g., arming Ukraine to the teeth or putting permanent tariffs on products from China), the worm could turn and all of a sudden hundreds of authentic-looking postings supposedly from his team could come after him. Imagine how fast a fake audio recording that sounded very much like Marco Rubio saying "Trump has serious dementia. He thinks he just made a great deal with Chairman Mao. He needs to go" would spread. (V)