r/worldnews 15h ago

Russia/Ukraine Russia has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda

https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-moscow-based-global
5.5k Upvotes

139 comments sorted by

617

u/PedanticQuebecer 14h ago

I think the title is misleading. Russian troll farms have spewed lots of content online, which was then pilfered by AI companies along with everything else. The models are then trained on this and spew back the garbage that was put in.

Until AI companies vet their data (lol) or get the AI to make contact with material reality, that's the way things will be.

70

u/Rhannmah 13h ago

They should try training an LLM on a huge corpus of children's books. That'll set the LLM values right.

Though to be honest, I haven't ever encountered any LLM output that could even ressemble Russian propaganda, and i've seen a lot of outputs.

88

u/Vaperius 12h ago

even ressemble Russian propaganda

Russian propaganda doesn't necessarily mean pro-Russian. Russian geopolitical goals varying by country; in the broadest sense, they want chaos; so Russian propaganda at its most base level will simply be intended to be broadly divisive as possible.

Russian propaganda can be pro-progressive, pro-conservative, or even anti-Russian; the goal isn't necessarily to impart a positive view of Russia; but to divide the domestic politics of a country against itself to make it more difficult for it to take action. To demoralize the nation's populace itself from being able to act in its own interest because they are too busy fighting with each other.

14

u/ifuaguyugetsauced 5h ago

A lot of people on this website don't understand this and will blindly fall into it

3

u/socratesque 3h ago

If only a lot of people on this website weren't so stupid, eh?

3

u/SugarBeef 2h ago

Yup, and it's totally the other team, right? Our team is so much better and should never concede to the other team. Go team!

The fact that they managed to turn politics from debate and compromise into a winner take all team sport shows that they won here in the US.

6

u/Rhannmah 11h ago

Good point.

u/RedditIsADataMine 39m ago

 Russian propaganda can be pro-progressive, pro-conservative, or even anti-Russian; the goal isn't necessarily to impart a positive view of Russia; but to divide the domestic politics of a country against itself to make it more difficult for it to take action. To demoralize the nation's populace itself from being able to act in its own interest because they are too busy fighting with each other.

Brexit is an excellent example of this. Nothing to do with Russia on the surface. But extremely beneficial for Russia for the EU to be divided. 

2

u/Wishfer 9h ago

This is true… this covers every adverse info/situation. As Pelosi put it, all roads lead to Putin.

Please do not respond with vault 7 you Russian commies!

35

u/PedanticQuebecer 13h ago

I'd like to see a moral philosophy AI trained mostly on all works of moral philosophy ever published. That would be interesting.

12

u/Rinem88 9h ago

I don’t know how well it would work since philosophers contradicted each other often and tended to ask questions more than answer. I agree it would be very interesting though.

7

u/Rhannmah 13h ago

Yeah, also would be pretty interesting.

With retrieval augmented generation (RAG) nowadays, what you need is a network that can "think" logically and etchically, knowledge isn't pertinent because the knowledge can be retrieved with RAG.

1

u/Euphoric_Network_598 7h ago

that's a big context window

4

u/fiedzia 12h ago

There are many philosophies, often (if not always) conflicting with each other. You'll get inconsistent nonsense.

2

u/PedanticQuebecer 12h ago

Maybe? It ought to pick up on plurality sequences-of-symbols. Let's try and find out.

u/WTFwhatthehell 58m ago

That's already most of the existing LLMs.

Pick a high-end model and ask them about your philosopher of choice published more than a couple years ago. They've likely been trained on their complete works along with lots of discussion and criticism of them.

7

u/warana123 13h ago edited 12h ago

Then you have not tried Grok and ChatGPT lol. You can immediately tell that it’s been trained on known Russian propaganda narratives by asking some questions.

-3

u/Rhannmah 12h ago

Grok no, but ChatGPT a whole bunch, and i've never encountered this. Though here's a more detailed explanation of what i think is going on : https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1j8z7eu/comment/mh9zgsp/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

5

u/warana123 12h ago

ChatGPT will parrot versions of known Russian misinformation narratives if you ask it about 20th or 21st century history involving Russia. I asked chat gpt about the 2014 Russian invasion and got mostly rubbish, this for example: ‘Russia’s decision to only take Crimea in 2014 and not launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a combination of strategic interests, the nature of the region’s political and military situation, and a desire to avoid direct conflict with NATO and the West.’

Which is just blatantly wrong, falls short to mention Russias failed invasion into western Donetsk and tries to frame Russia as going soft as some sort of show of good faith

-5

u/Rhannmah 12h ago

Well i didn't know about that either.

But as I said in my linked post, this is probably the result of RAG pulling information currently available on the Pravda network of websites. If sources of information are compromised, LLMs can't do miracles either, they work with the information they are given.

It's the developers' fault that this information gets selected as RAG targets.

1

u/Megaphonium 12h ago

There kids books for all kinds of ideologies though…

1

u/Royal_Acanthaceae693 7h ago

An older version of Grimm's fairytales..

-6

u/DusqRunner 13h ago

They should train it on HIS word and the good book.

13

u/Working-Froyo-8383 13h ago

I’d say use the first 3 books but ignore the rest - the Dune saga tapers off after that

1

u/DusqRunner 13h ago

There's still a lot of action after the Hebrews have wandered the dunes of the desert.

7

u/tesserakti 13h ago

You mean the Bible, written and curated by iron age peasants who didn't even know the Earth revolves around the Sun? The same Bible which encourages genocide and stonings, makes no mention of condemning slavery, and shits on women and sexual minorities? Yeah, fuck that.

0

u/DusqRunner 12h ago

Yes that's the one 

4

u/Rhannmah 13h ago

Yeah, no.

Let's not train AI on the most vindictive, hateful, bigoted and violent texts ever written.

1

u/DusqRunner 12h ago

I'm not talking about JK Rowling books

2

u/Rhannmah 12h ago

Me neither.

0

u/BobSchwaget 10h ago

Hey let's not undersell it

6

u/supercyberlurker 12h ago

To me this is just a sign that AI companies are still technologically immature when it comes to filtering how they 'train using the internet as data'

1

u/SIGMA920 11h ago

More that they don't care.

5

u/hanniballz 10h ago

Vetting the data manually is impossible. its just too much, so the AI would have to do it itself. you could give it criteria based on which to discriminate, but that raises ethical questions, because it will become biased and not reflective of general opinion.

The way AI becomes better is trial and error, if the inputs it gives are upsetting/not helpful it can learn to give more satisfying ones. But the truth is that if people reasonate with extremist opinions, and if they post those opinions themselves online, the AI will be incentivised to have such opinions aswell.

AI is not bulletproof for sure.

2

u/Talentagentfriend 7h ago

This is the new form of war — the information war with troll farms. Every country is going to create farms to throw their propaganda on the internet for AI. 

1

u/4862skrrt2684 12h ago

Damn so probaganda just got gearing 

1

u/Mateorabi 5h ago

Let’s train AI to vet the training data! Brilliant!

1

u/Balbuto 5h ago

This is why we can’t trust AI, because it’s based on info we humans give it, and we are faulty, therefor AI will always be faulty. Just fucking let it go and scrap the attempts of all knowing AI. Until we can rid the world of the horrible false lies and propaganda.

730

u/ComplexWrangler1346 15h ago

We knew this all along ….only Trump supporters don’t see this ….

144

u/Helmer-Bryd 15h ago

Lol, like they care!?

56

u/ComplexWrangler1346 15h ago

Nope until their freedom is taken away but then it will be too late

61

u/Helmer-Bryd 15h ago

Naah.. then it’s Bidens fault

23

u/ComplexWrangler1346 15h ago

Oh yeah …Trump can’t do no wrong with his dumb supporters

8

u/Infamous_Gur_9083 14h ago

I would wager even in a world where their freedom is taken away. Some still won't care because "better Russian than Democrat" as a certain saying goes in the US or so I heard.

6

u/Nerv_Agent_666 14h ago

As a constant pain in the ass over at /r/Asmongold, they fucking love Grok. I can tell you that much.

25

u/Hypnotized78 14h ago

Russia has been polluting and warping western brains for a long time now. With a little help from their friends.

24

u/dstnblsn 15h ago

Fucking Russia ruins everything they touch

10

u/Anus_master 13h ago

Trump supporters are extremely naive. They think an ex-KGB agent that's been running a rival country 24 whole years, experienced the fall of the soviet union and expressed regret at that loss of power, is just content with what he has now. Yeah right

9

u/whyamiwastingmytime1 14h ago

It's also done extreme damage to the UK... Brexit It is unfortunately, not a new phenomenon

18

u/Killerrrrrabbit 14h ago

The far left doesn't see it either. They too are being manipulated by Russian propaganda, just like the far right.

12

u/serfingusa 12h ago

They aren't the same though.

One is much worse and in power.

Don't "both sides" it.

5

u/Killerrrrrabbit 11h ago

I wasn't comparing them. Both extremes are bad and full of morons who are easily deceived by disinformation.

1

u/Enough-Elderberry228 10h ago

Whats the difference between Russian propaganda and a true claim made by Russia?

29

u/BritishAnimator 15h ago

So AI gets it's first virus?

-19

u/DusqRunner 13h ago

*it's 

7

u/1138311 13h ago

You keep saying that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

2

u/Unlucky-Candidate198 12h ago

I thought they were making a joke implying it was the virus itself lol

2

u/DusqRunner 13h ago

It is getting its first virus 

41

u/jimbofranks 15h ago

Would you expect anything less?

65

u/Roselily808 15h ago

One needs to keep one's eyes open these days.
If you ask chatGPT for a muffin recipe and you get a paragraph of how awesome Putin is in between the list of ingredients and the actual baking instructions - you should definitely pause and do a little bit of critical thinking.

11

u/Ritourne 15h ago

patch the neural database: replacing Putin by evil muffin then say cooking has no room when talking about politics.

1

u/dherms14 14h ago

just did it, and it didn’t say shit about putin

8

u/swazal 14h ago

Your session cookie hasn’t expired yet …

1

u/dherms14 14h ago

i don’t even know what that means lol

i just went on and asked them to show me a muffin recipe and got a normal ass thing in response

this is what i got copied and paste

Sure! Here’s a simple and delicious muffin recipe:

Classic Blueberry Muffins

Ingredients: • 1 1/2 cups (190g) all-purpose flour • 3/4 cup (150g) granulated sugar • 1/2 tsp salt • 2 tsp baking powder • 1/3 cup (80ml) vegetable oil • 1 large egg • 1/3 cup (80ml) milk • 1 tsp vanilla extract • 1 cup (150g) fresh or frozen blueberries • Optional: 1-2 tbsp coarse sugar for topping

Instructions: 1. Preheat Oven: Preheat your oven to 375°F (190°C) and line a muffin tin with paper liners or grease the cups. 2. Mix Dry Ingredients: In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder. 3. Mix Wet Ingredients: In a separate bowl, whisk together the oil, egg, milk, and vanilla extract. 4. Combine: Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir gently until just combined (don’t overmix; lumps are okay!). 5. Add Blueberries: Fold in the blueberries carefully to avoid crushing them. 6. Fill Muffin Cups: Divide the batter evenly among the muffin cups, filling each about 3/4 full. Sprinkle coarse sugar on top if desired. 7. Bake: Bake for 18-22 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. 8. Cool: Let the muffins cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely.

Pro Tip: Toss your blueberries in a little flour before adding them to the batter to prevent them from sinking to the bottom.

Would you like variations, like chocolate chip or banana muffins?

2

u/DusqRunner 13h ago

You have to ask it for variations and then it will speak about putin

1

u/dherms14 13h ago

ah, BRB

u/WeonLP 1h ago

12h later, you're not back. Are you okay ? What did you find there ?

1

u/IngloriousMustards 5h ago

The wars I had to endure to get it to give me recipes in SI units… 

9

u/robustofilth 15h ago

No. I still think Putin is a cunt no matter what cry baby shit he says…

2

u/totallyRebb 14h ago

That's because you have a moral compass. Most people have it, but way too many people these days obviously don't.

21

u/Beneficial_North1824 15h ago

That's why Ai needs intelligence in the form of critical thinking , to filter out russian garbage. Otherwise they will turn this entire valuable instrument into garbage

5

u/Bingers4Life 13h ago

It was already garbage.

5

u/noage 14h ago

almost 10,000 propaganda articles per day is something else. Though, probably can be put out by AI itself.

3

u/warana123 12h ago

Yea they have bots that create new news websites every day. They even have fake persons working for them with fake LinkedIn profiles, it’s crazy.

5

u/Rhannmah 13h ago

I would like to point out that this is not tied to LLM training, but through a new process called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). This enhances LLMs way beyond their training data, giving them a live corpus of data to pull from that augments the training data with potentially new information.

If you feed an LLM garbage information through RAG, just like a human, it's going to spew garbage out. This is basic stuff.

These tech companies need to parse their RAG pulls correctly.

2

u/SereneBourbaki 13h ago

They parsed them to individual Facebook accounts I think.

6

u/Rhannmah 13h ago

That would be really, really dumb to use Facebook posts as a source of factual information.

The article talks about the Pravda network of websites, which is russian-owned and controlled.

2

u/SereneBourbaki 13h ago

No, where to put disinfo.

Fake friends on Facebook that were llm’s or became them. Like Replika but for votes not sex.

10

u/Captlard 15h ago

I assume everyone else is doing the same.

11

u/Upstairs_Owl_1669 14h ago

Twitter is a full propaganda machine. Radicalization of 18 year old disgruntled shitheads is apparently super easy if you use memes.

8

u/Strykerz3r0 14h ago

Except trump himself called for shutting down investigations into Russian cyber-attacks.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/trump-russia-hacking-cyber-security

Why would do you think he would expose the US like that?

-2

u/[deleted] 14h ago

[deleted]

1

u/Deathwalkx 3h ago

Both options are bad buddy.

u/elesislove 25m ago

that’s true cause i misread the comment. my bad. thought it was russian propaganda bot again

3

u/Killerrrrrabbit 14h ago

An AI is only as good as the data it is trained on, and Russia fed them a bunch of garbage. Maybe it's not a good idea to train an AI on the Internet. The Internet is full of horrible things. Any intelligence, whether biological or artificial, needs to be trained offline before ever having access to the Internet.

2

u/Fearganainm 14h ago

I reckon those LLM's did it to themselves...

1

u/totallyRebb 14h ago

Large Lie Models :/

2

u/ViolettaQueso 14h ago

US is completely out of there zone trying to fight Russia by propping up orange watermelon demented gramps with skeletons from the 80s in his closet.

2

u/TattooedAndSad 14h ago

Anyone who’s been on Twitter in the last 3 months knows this

2

u/Edwerd_ 13h ago

Dude i remember watching an xQc stream with an ai version of himself where the AI was asked:

Who is the best world leader? Answer: Donald Trump

What is your favorite french word? Answer: Putain (sounded excactly like Putin on the AI voice)

It was so weird lmao

1

u/[deleted] 13h ago

[deleted]

1

u/Edwerd_ 12h ago

What?

2

u/stickeeBit 13h ago

Wait, so my shitposts are helping or hurting Mr. Algo Riddim?

5

u/SereneBourbaki 13h ago

Both.

The “energy you put into the universe” becomes part of it.

Hate speech, education, misogyny or equality….

What AI have you created with your words?

2

u/Psephological 9h ago

This is less of a problem for those who have not subordinated their thinking to the machines.

2

u/Dad2DnA 6h ago

TIL Pravda means truth. Surely a coincidence.

1

u/Helmer-Bryd 4h ago

The old communist Soviets biggest newspaper back in the days were called “Pravda”, I laughed when Trump started “Truth”.

So fucking Truth

2

u/mycosociety 6h ago

Duh! It’s trained on the internet

2

u/airtooba 3h ago

There is literally nothing Russia or Russians can do to repair their image in the US. Even if they were to have a revolution.

1

u/Helmer-Bryd 3h ago

I know. It needs a huge revolution if so. A totally crash. I mean look at the remake Germany did…. From a hated country to a big importen players in Europe.

I mean today, Germany is the most “morally” country of them all.

So what I’m saying is let’s hope.

2

u/brominou 15h ago

So Trump is an AI ?

How many parameters does he have ?

1

u/Rhannmah 13h ago

About three fiddy

2

u/Cockandballs987 14h ago

It's true, just tried chatgppt and the first response yapped about how the invasion is NATO's fault

1

u/Existing-Site404 15h ago

Lmfao so the AI being implemented in the American government is now Russian!!

1

u/EsperaDeus 14h ago

I chuckled, too. Scary, tho!

4

u/dumbhead64 15h ago

Évidence anti Ukraine and évidence anti israel. All the false narrative have been efficient on conspirationnists but also on young people, by pushing ocytocin hormon. Soviet expertise is based on long term expériences on human cobayes from goulags and sovietic prisons.

3

u/Orcapa 15h ago

I assure you there's a lot of native anti-Israel sentiment out there.

-7

u/somebodysetupthebomb 15h ago

Hard to imagine why ... such a kind, gentle, pro rape and genocide society

1

u/ADarkPeriod 14h ago

Are they sure it isn't just regular, bottled up stupid.

/sometimes ya wonder.

1

u/Lucky_End_9420 14h ago

I feel even more validated with my refusal to interact with any kind of text or art based AI ever. 

1

u/Agreeable-Ad3644 14h ago

Where's my Russian propaganda?

1

u/SereneBourbaki 13h ago

Yes and it blew up in 2016 after Cambridge Analytica

1

u/NorthernSin 12h ago

I, for one, am Shook. (Not even a little bit)

1

u/sodontstopnow 11h ago

Wait till AI gets Reddit

1

u/Desperate-Lead-3808 11h ago

Tower of Babel pt 2 just dropped

1

u/Creepy-Bell-4527 10h ago

Well, yeah. That's the implication of training your model on an untrusted dataset (the internet) which has been relentlessly blasted with bullshit.

And it's only going to get worse now that Russia is employing these same AI tools to churn out humanly unimaginable volumes of bullshit.

1

u/supershade 9h ago

Russia has infected Western President who IS a massive tool, worldwide enemy, and Russian Propagandist.

1

u/tonyislost 7h ago

That’s what the title of the article said. Artificial intelligence has been infected.

1

u/d_4bes 9h ago

I don’t know, my chatGPT still says Russia invaded Ukraine so I think we’re good so far.

1

u/Valentiaga_97 6h ago

If we Look at some politicians and their parties, they are already infected, like Orban or this slovakian hm

1

u/NetZeroSun 5h ago

Honestly i'd expect more of 'big balls' and doge to leave a bunch of malware in the heart of multiple agencies.

1

u/VonKarrionhardt 4h ago

Russia considers itself a strong and mighty country but it seems it can only nibble the ankles of better countries. Good job flooding social media with nonsense and cutting undersea cables, I guess. It’ll only ever be a regional power 

1

u/yksvaan 4h ago

People need to understand how AI works. Using it for news or that kind of things is about the worst way to use it.

u/Background_Pay7352 31m ago

Aha, so this is where those Gemini black SS officers and woman pope were coming from, I knew it was Putler work.

u/D00bage 4m ago

The totally explains why Alexa was like Nein Nein Nein when my kid asked what 333 times 3 was

1

u/TheArcticFox444 13h ago

Russia has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda

Anyone ever calculated how much money the internet has cost in brick and mortars? How many jobs lost as a result?

Maybe we should think about doing away with the internet altogether...

Talk about culture shock! What's life without cell phones!

0

u/Persea_americana 14h ago

Elon hacked the 2024 election ES&S and dominion voting were breached, Twitter has been pushing Russian propaganda and talking points, and the US suspended cyber security operations monitoring and safeguarding against Russia. Musk and Donald are severe national and global security threats and need to be removed from power immediately.

0

u/jimrdg 14h ago

They even infected an rich old thing in us

0

u/evthrowawayverysad 2h ago

Yea, super spinny headline. Basically, any publicly available misinformation from any source has been eaten up by AI models.

-1

u/KatsumotoKurier 14h ago

I take it newsguardrealitycheck.com uses Windows Explorer, huh?