A Spy’s Guide to Fighting A.I. Propaganda
New York Times · LC · trust 8/100
Credit... Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times Listen · 8:56 min Share full article 0 By Anthony Vinci
Mr. Vinci is a former senior intelligence officer and was the first chief technology officer for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
If this sounds like a chapter from another century — think K.G.B. officers swaying unsuspecting fellow travelers in London or New York — it’s actually worse. The spy runner is a Russia-backed network called Portal Kombat that operates hundreds of websites to spread disinformation. The powerful figures it’s seeking to influence? Artificial intelligence-driven large language models such as ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini.
Portal Kombat’s goal is to influence these models so that they will pass along propaganda to trusting users in response to questions. Portal Kombat pushed over 3.6 million stories across hundreds of independent websites in dozens of languages in 2024, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks online disinformation. NewsGuard researchers systematically tested A.I. chat systems and found that Portal Kombat propaganda was regularly provided to users.
Large language model influence operations are just one way that America’s adversaries are using A.I. to try to steer its politics. China directs its A.I. platforms to push false claims about the treatment of Uyghurs and to censor dissent and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. Russia is using A.I. to generate scores of news websites to turn Americans against democracy and Western alliances. Like many, these adversaries use A.I. to create fake written, audio or video content that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.
The greatest danger, though, isn’t A.I.’s ability to lie. It’s the ability to persuade. These new agents of influence are less like a traditional propaganda pamphlet — static and lifeless — and more like a living, breathing case officer, as I used to be. A.I. agents try to manipulate us through sustained engagement. And unlike the K.G.B.’s espionage machinations during the Cold War, which focused on recruiting powerful individuals, today’s A.I. influence operators are trying to persuade all of us.
To fight back, Americans need to learn the counterspy techniques of C.I.A. officers: using multiple sources to check information; testing those sources regularly for reliability; never getting complacent and trusting one source without thinking.
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