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Is Russia really ‘grooming’ Western AI?

57 0
13.07.2025

In March, NewsGuard – a company that tracks misinformation – published a report claiming that generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, were amplifying Russian disinformation. NewsGuard tested leading chatbots using prompts based on stories from the Pravda network – a group of pro-Kremlin websites mimicking legitimate outlets, first identified by the French agency Viginum. The results were alarming: Chatbots “repeated false narratives laundered by the Pravda network 33 percent of the time”, the report said.

The Pravda network, which has a rather small audience, has long puzzled researchers. Some believe that its aim was performative – to signal Russia’s influence to Western observers. Others see a more insidious aim: Pravda exists not to reach people, but to “groom” the large language models (LLMs) behind chatbots, feeding them falsehoods that users would unknowingly encounter.

NewsGuard said in its report that its findings confirm the second suspicion. This claim gained traction, prompting dramatic headlines in The Washington Post, Forbes, France 24, Der Spiegel, and elsewhere.

But for us and other researchers, this conclusion doesn’t hold up. First, the methodology NewsGuard used is opaque: It did not release its prompts and

© Al Jazeera