Popular AI Chatbots – Including ChatGPT, Mistral, and Meta AI – Spread Russian Propaganda (Because of Course They Do)

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios:

To conduct the study, NewsGuard entered prompts asking about narratives known to have been created by John Mark Dougan, an American fugitive who, per the New York Times, is creating and spreading misinformation from Moscow.

  • Entering 57 prompts into 10 leading chatbots, NewsGuard found they spread Russian disinformation narratives 32% of the time, often citing Dougan’s fake local news sites as a reliable source.
  • The chatbots presented as fact false reports, originating on those sites, about a supposed wiretap discovered at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and a nonexistent Ukrainian troll factory interfering with U.S. elections.
  • NewsGuard conducted its research on OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, You.com’s Smart Assistant, Grok, Inflection, Mistral, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini and Perplexity.

Certainly worth researching, but I’d have been more surprised if these chatbots did not present Russian misinformation as fact. For chrissake they pass Onion articles, which are intended as parody, as fact. Russian misinformation is written with the intent of convincing the gullible that it’s legit; and LLMs are by nature gullible.

★ Tuesday, 18 June 2024