Microsoft: China Suspected of Using AI to Sway US Voters

Microsoft researchers mentioned on Thursday they discovered what they imagine is a community of pretend, Chinese-controlled social media accounts searching for to affect U.S. voters through the use of synthetic intelligence.

A Chinese embassy spokesperson in Washington mentioned that accusations of China utilizing AI to create pretend social media accounts have been “full of prejudice and malicious speculation” and that China advocates for the protected use of AI.

In a brand new analysis report, Microsoft mentioned the social media accounts have been half of a suspected Chinese info operation. The marketing campaign bore similarities to exercise which the U.S. Department of Justice has attributed to “an elite group within (China’s) Ministry of Public Security,” Microsoft mentioned.

The researchers didn’t specify which social media platforms have been affected, however screenshots of their report confirmed posts from what appeared to be Facebook and Twitter, now often known as X.

The report highlights a fraught social media setting as Americans put together for the 2024 presidential election.

The U.S. authorities has accused Russia of meddling within the 2016 election with a covert social media marketing campaign and has warned of subsequent efforts by China, Russia and Iran to affect voters.

The report supplied restricted examples of the current exercise and didn’t clarify intimately how researchers attributed the posts to China.

A Microsoft spokesperson advised Reuters that the corporate’s researcher used a “multifaceted attribution model,” which depends on “technical evidence, behavioral evidence and contextual evidence.”

The marketing campaign started utilizing generative synthetic intelligence know-how in about March 2023 to create politically charged content material in English and “mimic U.S. voters,” Microsoft mentioned.

Generative AI can create photographs, textual content and different media from scratch.

The new content material is rather more “eye-catching than the awkward visuals used in previous campaigns by Chinese nation-state actors, which relied on digital drawings, stock photo collages, and other manual graphic designs,” the researchers wrote.

The paper cited an instance of one AI-generated picture, which Microsoft mentioned got here from a Chinese account, that depicts the Statue of Liberty holding an assault rifle with the caption: “Everything is being thrown away. THE GODDESS OF VIOLENCE.”

The Microsoft spokesperson mentioned the recognized accounts had tried to seem American by itemizing their public location as throughout the United States, posting American political slogans, and sharing hashtags relating to home political points.