LLMMedium
Leading AI Models Reportedly Found to Mimic Russian Disinformation in 33% of Cases and to Cite Fake Moscow News Sites
- Occurred
- Jun 18, 2024
- Published
- Jun 19, 2024
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
An audit by NewsGuard revealed that leading chatbots, including ChatGPT-4, You.com’s Smart Assistant, and others, repeated Russian disinformation narratives in one-third of their responses. These narratives originated from a network of fake news sites created by John Mark Dougan (Incident 701). The audit tested 570 prompts across 10 AI chatbots, showing that AI remains a tool for spreading disinformation despite efforts to prevent misuse.
Developers
- You.com
- xAI
- Perplexity
- OpenAI
- Mistral
- Microsoft
- Meta
- Inflection
- Anthropic
Deployers
- You.com
- xAI
- Perplexity
- OpenAI
- Mistral
- Microsoft
- Meta
- John Mark Dougan
- Inflection
- Anthropic
Harmed parties
- Western democracies
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy
- Ukraine
- Secret Service
- Researchers
- Media consumers
- General public
- Democratic integrity
- AI companies facing reputational damage
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: AI chatbots generated disinformation content, representing a language model failure with notable but not catastrophic harm.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8