Researchers at Graphika say that online propaganda campaigns have flooded the internet with low-quality, AI-generated content.

“Influence operations have been systematically integrating AI tools, and a lot of it is low-quality, cheap AI slop,” said Dina Sadek, a senior analyst at Graphika and co-author of the report. As was the case before such campaigns started routinely using AI, the vast majority of their posts on Western social media sites receive little to no attention, she said.

Online influence campaigns aimed at swaying American politics and pushing divisive messages go back at least a decade, when the Russia-based Internet Research Agency created scores of Facebook and Twitter accounts and tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.

As in some other fields, like cybersecurity and programming, the rise of AI hasn’t revolutionized the field of online propaganda, but it has made it easier to automate some tasks, Sadek said.

“It might be low-quality content, but it’s very scalable on a mass scale. They’re able to just sit there, maybe one individual pressing buttons there, to create all this content,” she said.