Leading artificial intelligence chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Meta AI, are generating and spreading Russian disinformation narratives, according to a NewsGuard investigation published by news website Axios.
NewsGuard is a digital transparency company that aims to counter misinformation in online media. For the purposes of this study, analysts introduced prompts related to known Russian disinformation campaigns to test the responses of 10 popular chatbots.
The study found that chatbots responded with Russian propaganda theses 32 percent of the time, citing fake news sites as if they were credible sources.
"It's really alarming how often these chatbots repeat falsifications and propaganda," NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill told Axios.
The study included prompts related to stories spread by John Mark Dougan, a former US police officer who now spouts Kremlin propaganda. The chatbots then often repeated Dougan's claims, presenting them as fact.
Among the chatbots' false claims are fake news about a Ukrainian troll factory "interfering" in the US election and wiretapping former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. In these cases, Dogan's propaganda sites are cited as legitimate news sources.
"This report really demonstrates in concrete terms why the industry needs to pay close attention to news and information," explained Brill.
The analysts conducted their research using OpenAI's ChatGPT-4, You.com's Smart Assistant, Grok, Inflection, Mistral, Microsoft's Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic's Claude, Google Gemini, and Perplexity.
"Don't trust the answers most of these chatbots give to news-related questions, especially controversial topics," Brill urged. | BGNES
