Disrupting a new covert influence campaign from Russia

Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We advance this mission by deploying our innovations to build AI tools that help people solve hard problems. This includes building tools that enable us to detect, investigate, disrupt and expose covert influence operations (IO): deceptive attempts to manipulate public opinion or influence political outcomes without revealing the true identity or intentions of the actors behind them.

We recently banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts originating in Russia that were being used to promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a self-described “expert community” based in Israel. What began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation, built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a “sovereignty” index called the Burke Sovereignty Index that cast Russia in a favorable light, and efforts to disguise the operators’ Russian origins. Although the campaign appears to have reached relatively small audiences, its elaborate construction distinguishes it from other Russia-linked⁠(opens in a new window) influence⁠(opens in a new window) operations⁠(opens in a new window) we have disrupted⁠(opens in a new window) since the start of the war in Ukraine. This report explains how the operation worked, where ChatGPT fit into it, and what we did to disrupt it.

Actor

We banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that very likely originated in Russia. The operators prompted in Russian to generate social media comments that were posted on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. Most of the comments they generated were in English, and the operators instructed ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that they were Russian. As we do not allow access to our models from Russia, they used VPNs to access our platform.