Large online propaganda campaigns are flooding the internet with 'AI slop,' researchers say
Source: NBC News
Nov. 19, 2025, 6:00 AM EST
Many of the largest and most widely established state-sponsored online propaganda campaigns have embraced using artificial intelligence, a new report finds and theyre often bad at it.
The report, by the social media analytics company Graphika, analyzed nine ongoing online influence operations including ones it says are affiliated with Chinas and Russias governments and found that each has, like much of social media, increasingly adopted generative AI to make images, videos, text and translations.
The researchers found that sponsors of propaganda campaigns have come to rely on AI for core functions like making content and creating influencer personas on social media, streamlining some campaigns. But the researchers say that content is low quality and gets little engagement.
The findings run counter to what many researchers had anticipated with the growing sophistication of generative AI artificial intelligence that mimics human speech, writing and images in pictures and videos. The technology has rapidly become more advanced in recent years, and some experts warned that propagandists working on behalf of authoritarian countries would embrace high-quality, convincing synthetic content designed to deceive even the most discerning people in democratic societies.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/online-propaganda-campaigns-are-using-ai-slop-researchers-say-rcna244618
Link to Carnegie Endowment REPORT - Can Democracy Survive the Disruptive Power of AI?
The biggest operation is coming out of the RNC and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
bucolic_frolic
(53,314 posts)A British company tried to enroll me about 10 months ago. You choose your topic and guide AI to write the script, there are sites to choose the talking head and voice. Some of it you can't tell the difference, but the repetitive head fakes and gestures are a dead giveaway. There are trolls to fill the comments with hype, though discerning folks aren't duped. I know of genuine people who do it and they're not engaging YouTube very much anymore. I can spot AI fakes unless they're very good, but what annoys me is the channels that chop up decades old interviews, perhaps add narration in the original voice and then act like it's new content. Waste of time. I have to wonder if AI and the internet won't render themselves useless. If none pay attention won't it go away? Truth is entering the Dark Ages in an era of universal communication.
jfz9580m
(16,159 posts)This is what makes the Cornucopian and brainless narrative of infinite growth plus human colonization of every last remaining patch of earth so misguided imo.
You have an exploding population that increasingly works in more bullshit jobs that make you feel mentally off-balance, have a few kids and fuel the same machine with consumption. There is no point to such an enterprise and to have it tacitly be assumed that we all back some version of this dreary view is a problem even this insane administration aside.
Economics as a field has been very lopsided and largely discounted the planet as relevant to anything but as a backdrop to this busy hum of bullshit colonization that is glorified.
erronis
(22,017 posts)BumRushDaShow
(163,541 posts)Notably on social media, including purportedly "official press releases", and appearances on RW loon podcasts.
mdbl
(7,798 posts)None of it is truthful. None of it is useful. Almost all is misleading.