At a glance.
- Lawfare as disinformation.
- Generative AI can lend plausibility to disinformation.
- What's coming in a "post-truth" world?
- Who's got the best army in the world? Russia does (says Russia).
Lawfare as disinformation.
One of the war crimes Russian leaders stand formally accused of is the widespread abduction of Ukrainian children. The Duma is pushing a counternarrative: it wasn't abduction at all, but child protection. The Russian authorities were rescuing children from Ukrainian persecution.
Thus the Kremlin is working to develop a narrative of child protection, the UK's Ministry of Defence reported this morning. "On 20 June 2023, Russia’s Duma voted to create a parliamentary committee to investigate alleged crimes committed by the Ukrainian government against juveniles in the Donbas since 2014. The Duma is almost certainly responding to the international condemnation of Russia’s deportation of children from occupied Ukraine since its full-scale invasion. The move is highly likely both a form of ‘lawfare’ and contributes to Russian information operations, weaponising legislation by attempting to muddy the narrative around its own egregious actions. Messaging around children’s rights is likely an important communications theme for the Kremlin because alleged child deportations formed the basis of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against President Putin issued in March 2023."
Generative AI can lend plausibility to disinformation.
These findings are about emerging techniques in fraud, but it has obvious implications for disinformation technology. Sift has released its Q2 2023 Digital Trust and Safety Index which focused on “Fighting fraud in the age of AI automation” and discussed the use of generative AI in social engineering schemes and the fears from consumers surrounding the new technology. The fears aren’t entirely groundless. “In the last six months, 68% of consumers noticed an increase in the frequency of spam and scams, likely driven by the surge in AI-generated content. And Sift data shows a 40% increase in the average rate of fraudulent content blocked from the network in Q1 2023 vs. the entirety of 2022. This trajectory is only expected to continue.” The threat associated with AI is that it lowers the barrier to entry for fraud and social engineering scams. There's an easy plausibility to the language it generates that outdoes the text non-native (or even less-gifted native) speakers produce.
Generative AI has clear potential for producing arguably persuasive copy, at scale for rapid dissemination and amplification in social media and other channels. To consider the potential of this technology, contrast that potential with some recent attempts at disinformation. Russia has mobilized social media to push its own narratives, most recently the narrative that Ukraine's counteroffensive has failed. That particular view seems not only false (in addition to being in any case grossly premature) but it also appears to have gained little traction, according to the Atlantic Council's DFRLab monitoring. Generative AI could have helped them do better. For more on the abuse of generative AI for social engineering, see CyberWire Pro.
What's coming in a "post-truth" world?
WIRED entertains some speculation about the effects AI will have on the minds of those who consume it. Psychologists, the piece says, have yet to come to grips with AI's potential effect on the human psyche. Some effects are obvious (and similar effects have attended every other technological advance). For example, we now rely on GPS to an extent that many (most?) people have forgotten how to read a map. (Of course, maps themselves were a technological advance that displaced other, more intimate knowledge of how to find oneself on the terrain.) Other effects might be greater difficulty in assessing evidence (and the difficulty of knowing what authority to trust is part of what people seem to mean when they talk about a "post-truth world."
Who's got the best army in the world? Russia does (says Russia).
The Russian Media Monitor has drawn attention to (and subtitled) a recent episode of Vladimir Solovyov's chat show on Russian state television. A panel of experts crows very high about the combat performance of the Russian Army, which they say is universally recognized as the best in the world. It's "tasted victory" and is "unstoppable," capable of world conquest if only "it's permitted to do its job." This show is obviously intended for domestic consumption, or at most by very poorly informed foreigners. Foreigners who've followed the course of Russia's war will have difficulty recognizing the road-bound, poorly trained, badly maintained, indifferently supplied, and ill-led force that's currently being slowly pushed from its conquests by an outnumbered enemy. An atrocity machine, to be sure, but not much good at fire and maneuver against a motivated opponent. Good armies don't need barrier troops to force the infantry to hold their positions at gunpoint.
The comments about the need to let the army do its job are unpleasantly reminiscent of the stab-in-the-back legend that grew up in Germany at the end of the First World War. If indeed this is, in the state propagandists' view, a stab in the back, then whose hand is holding the dagger?