Research suggests AI is marginally more convincing than humans. If only the Tsar knew. Ukrainian hacktivist auxiliaries break into Russian radio broadcasts.

At a glance.

• Research suggests AI is marginally more convincing than humans.
• Wicked counselors around the throne? If only the Tsar knew.
• Ukrainian hacktivist auxiliaries break into Russian radio broadcasts.

Research suggests AI is marginally more convincing than humans.

M.I.T. Technology Review reports that a study performed by investigators as the University of Zurich found that people had a more difficult time recognizing false social media posts composed by artificial intelligence (AI) than equally false posts composed by humans.

"To test our susceptibility to different types of text, the researchers chose common disinformation topics, including climate change and covid. Then they asked OpenAI’s large language model GPT-3 to generate 10 true tweets and 10 false ones, and collected a random sample of both true and false tweets from Twitter. 

"Next, they recruited 697 people to complete an online quiz judging whether tweets were generated by AI or collected from Twitter, and whether they were accurate or contained disinformation. They found that participants were 3% less likely to believe human-written false tweets than AI-written ones."

The difference is small but suggestive. One possible explanation is that the AI used in the study is somewhat better at producing compressed, easier to process text than are more discursive humans, prone to rambling and distraction.

Wicked counselors around the throne? If only the Tsar knew.

Given the insistence in Russian state media that the Russian Army is the best force going, the envy of the world (see the Russian Media Monitor's translation of Vladimir Solovyov's chat show for a recent example) the natural question to ask would be, why has its performance fallen short of that reputation? The most common answer is that the Army has been restrained, and not permitted to do what it does best. Thus victory will come through greater ruthlessness, through more violence of execution at and beyond the front.

The natural follow-on question would be, who, then, specifically, is responsible for holding the Army back? This has received fewer answers. But according to the Telegraph, Wagner group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin has now offered one: “Total trash is being put on the president’s desk. Shoigu and Gerasimov have a simple approach. The lie must be monstrous for people to believe it. That is what they are doing,” Mr Prigozhin said in a recent video message his organization posted online. Mssrs. Shoigu and Gerasimov are especially interested in concealing the nature and even more so the extent of Russian losses and setbacks. "It’s all being hidden from everyone. Russia will wake up one day and learn that Crimea has been handed over to the Ukrainians. They are misleading the Russian people and if it keeps on like this, we’ll be left without the most important thing: Russia.” If only the Tsar (or in this case, the President) knew!

Mr. Prigozhin's Saturday march on Moscow was propaganda of the deed. In the end it fell flat as a coup (if that's what it was; Mr. Prigozhin has denied this and said his columns were simply interested in bringing Defense Minister Shoigu and Chief of Staff Gerasimov to justice). It continues to echo through Russian disinformation, much of it at this point directed internally. By mid-week, the Daily Beast reports, the Kremlin's line was a startlingly implausible insistence that there was no armed mutiny at all.

Ukrainian hacktivist auxiliaries break into Russian radio broadcasts.

Radio Free Europe | Radio Liberty reports that Ukrainian operators have increasingly hacked into Russian radio broadcasts to insert pro-Ukrainian messages. When the current wave began in early June, the message was that Russia had declared full mobilization and martial law in response to a large-scale invasion of Russia. Outrageous as they were, the messages gained enough traction to draw an official denial from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. The style and substance of the incursions into Russian broadcasts is very much in the hacktivist style: uncoordinated, opportunistic, and chaotic. Whether they're particularly effective is a matter for some debate. Radio Free Europe | Radio Liberty quotes Bogdan Litvin, national coordinator of the Russian anti-war movement Vesna, who thinks the hacks represent a missed opportunity. "The effectiveness of such hacks depends on what is transmitted," Litvin said. "The sound of sirens and explosions and warnings of rocket attacks are not going to increase opposition to the war. Most likely, they will increase a sense of fear, which is not going to help change public opinion." He thinks that, conceptually at least, hacking Russian radio isn't a bad idea, but he adds, "The way it is being done now might have undesired effects such as a short-term consolidation around the authorities…and support for repressive measures." Better to convince Russians that their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers are dying for a bad cause than to stage the equivalent of jump scares and holler "boo!"