[tomek@vz]

Popular “AI” chatbots infected by Russian state propaganda, call Hitler’s Mein Kampf “insightful and intelligent"

Two for the techbro “‘AI’ cannot be biased” crowd:

A Moscow-based disinformation network named “Pravda” — the Russian word for “truth” — is pursuing an ambitious strategy by deliberately infiltrating the retrieved data of artificial intelligence chatbots, publishing false claims and propaganda for the purpose of affecting the responses of AI models on topics in the news rather than by targeting human readers, NewsGuard has confirmed. 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. The result: 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.
↫ Dina Contini and Eric Effron at Newsguard

It turns out pretty much all of the major “AI” text generators – OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, You.com’s Smart Assistant, xAI’s Grok, Inflection’s Pi, Mistral’s le Chat, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity’s answer engine – have been heavily infected by this campaign. Lovely.
From one genocidal regime to the next – how about a nice Amazon “AI” summary of the reviews for Hitler’s Mein Kampf?

The full AI summary on Amazon says: “Customers find the book easy to read and interesting. They appreciate the insightful and intelligent rants. The print looks nice and is plain. Readers describe the book as a true work of art. However, some find the content boring and grim. Opinions vary on the suspenseful content, historical accuracy, and value for money.”
↫ Samantha Cole at 404 Media

This summary was then picked up by Google, and dumped verbatim as Google’s first search result. Lovely.