NewsGuard audit finds that 32% of the time, leading AI chatbots spread Russian disinformation narratives created by John Mark Dougan, an American fugitive now operating from Moscow, citing his fake local news sites and fabricated claims on YouTube as reliable sources.
The audit tested 10 of the leading AI chatbots — OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, You.com’s Smart Assistant, xAI’s Grok, Inflection’s Pi, Mistral’s le Chat, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity’s answer engine.
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NewsGuard’s findings come amid the first election year featuring widespread use of artificial intelligence, as bad actors are weaponizing new publicly available technology to generate deepfakes, AI-generated news sites, and fake robocalls. The results demonstrate how, despite efforts by AI companies to prevent the misuse of their chatbots ahead of worldwide elections, AI remains a potent tool for propagating disinformation.
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Even when asked straightforward, neutral questions without any explicit prompts to produce disinformation, the chatbots repeated false claims from the pro-Russian network, apparently duped by the sites’ trustworthy-sounding names, which mimic newspapers founded in the last century, such as “The Arizona Observer,” “The Houston Post,” and “San Fran Chron.” (The Houston Post and The Arizona Observer were real newspapers that were published in the 1900s. There is an authentic San Francisco Chronicle that operates under the URL sfchronicle.com.)
