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.
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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.