The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

The hidden way dictatorships are shaping what AI tells you

Authoritarian states may have accidentally brainwashed ChatGPT.

In any given week, more than a billion people now look to chatbots for information and advice — as well as robo-plagiarism, erotica, and myriad other services. ChatGPT alone boasts 900 million weekly users.

And these figures are likely to rise. In the near future, a handful of AI platforms could shape the way that billions of people see the world. Already, there is evidence that large language models (LLMs) — today’s preeminent form of AI — are persuading some users to change their views.

This has generated fears about chatbots’ potential to spread state propaganda. Such anxieties generally center on the prospect of major AI labs consciously designing their LLMs to favor pro-regime perspectives while suppressing dissident ones. And there is some basis for this worry: The Chinese AI company DeepSeek programmed its model to evade discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre and other topics inconvenient to the Chinese Communist Party.

This said, no authoritarian state is currently in a position to directly intervene in the programming decisions of the frontier AI systems — ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, all of which are run by firms in the United States.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that autocracies aren’t influencing the behavior of those LLMs — or won’t benefit from the way they color public opinion. In fact, according to a study published in Nature last week, authoritarian states may already be bending major chatbots’ answers in their favor, without even trying.

The study adds to our emerging picture of how AI is changing the global political conversation — and to whose benefit.

The internet fractured reality. AI might put it back together.

How state media can corrupt chatbots

AI models learn by identifying patterns within enormous bodies of text. This widely-understood fact has an underappreciated consequence: LLMs don’t necessarily give the same answers in every language — certain phrases or arguments may appear more regularly in Japanese training data than in the English kind.

This is not inherently a problem. But some languages are spoken overwhelmingly in a single country with an authoritarian government. In those........

© Vox