Iran Exploiting U.S. News Sites Planting AI Inauthentic News

"Because we're in a very red part of Florida, I usually don' run PeaceVoice columns, but this one struck me as thought-provoking and not a strident attack on Mr. Trump, which would be problematic for much of our readership."

David Adlerstein, publisher, Port St.Joe Star, Florida

 

"We identified almost 100 articles published or syndicated under the operation's bylines across roughly a dozen online outlets around the world."

"These were small to medium outlets, generally focused on international affairs, geopolitics, and events in the Middle East."

"The overall activity appeared consistent with a commercial actor running a for-hire influence campaign but we are unable to identify the particular actor involved."

"AI can give such false-front operations greater scale, efficiency, linguistic fluency, and editorial ability."

"The operators can use these advantages to exploit unsuspecting victims, such as employees or editors, and plant their content in front of audiences who have no idea who was behind it, or what their motivations were."

"The overall activity appeared consistent with a commercial actor running a for-hire influence campaign, but we are unable to identify the particular actor involved."

 "We have shared information on this case with the relevant authorities."

OpenAI

OpenAI says in a new report that it had shut down an influence operation from Iran that used ChatGPT to secretly push anti-American propaganda.

 

"[We have found, and disrupted operations by state actors, including Iran, that used Claude to] build, run, and otherwise facilitate surveillance operations [targeting ethnic minorities and dissidents]."

Anthropic

 

"Artificial intelligence has made it much easier to produce multilingual propaganda, create fake identities, and discredit critics." 

"On the other hand, authoritarian governments often use the fight against misinformation as a pretext for censorship, expanded surveillance, and even pressure to reveal users' identities."

Pooyesh Azizeddin, human rights and technology researcher 

No doubt there were many readers, in doubt regarding President Trump's conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran who found titles such as, “Is America’s Iran Policy Being Privatized? The Jared Kushner Question,” and “The Iran War and the Collapse of Western Moral Credibility”, viewing them as cogent affirmation of their own perceptions. Published in what most readers might consider credible news outlets such as The L.A. Monitor and Middle East Monitor, it is even possible that these outlets had an inkling that what they were publishing was a collaboration between AI chatbots and skillfully deceptive Iranian agents.
 

After all, it is no secret that many users of social media platforms are not individuals at all, but faked personalities with faked backgrounds, used to perpetrate news fraud, and perpetuate a malign entity's version of events to manipulate public opinion and create dissent and chaos in the land of the enemy, targeting the version of events and the very authority of a government's decision-making, to influence its public that in the final analysis the costly business of prosecuting a war will come back to haunt the ordinary citizen, tasked unwillingly to support that war and paying for it under imposed economic duress. 

 

"The bill will follow Americans beyond the fighting itself", read an opinion piece published in a tiny Florida weekly. This warning of the Iran conflict was purportedly composed by an Ervin Hoskins, a named byline in other articles published in other, larger publications including the Daily Kos article critical of the prosecution of the Iran war. Over 3 million followers read Daily Kos and Middle East Monitor on Facebook.  

"It’s remarkable that the Iranians managed to land their content in real media outlets, expanding the potential reach of their campaign."

"We’re witnessing AI enab[ling] foreign adversaries to better hide their hand, building more sophisticated false fronts than they might otherwise be able to in order to launder their content through authentic channels, leveraging those channels for reach."

Jessica Brandt, of the now-shuttered Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Foreign Malign Influence Center from 2023 to 2025

'Journalist' Hoskins has been revealed by  OpenAI to be part of an "influence campaign", its articles generated with the use of the OpenAI chatbot by users based in Iran. An estimated hundred fake articles across some 20 news outlets placed fake articles in a campaign to mislead and cause disruptions in the target countries. Editors failing to detect the artificial creation of some news they publish have finally taken to deleting AI-generated content under fake bylines.

 

A series of articles were removed by Business Insider and Wired last year, appearing under the byline Margaux Blanchard, and believed to be AI-generated. According to OpenAI, use of ChatGPT in political influence campaigns reflects an operation focused on seeding content related to U.S. military action in Iran. Negative impacts on Americans of the war are highlighted in the articles. A total of seven bylines in a series of AI-generated articles by users who sent instructions to the chatbot in Persian have been  outlined by OpenAI. 

 

 

 

"[We published the research to inform regulators, other companies and the public of] how we see threat actors trying to leverage AI, and to shine a light on the vulnerabilities they try to exploit."

ChatGPT 

Needless to say, it will not be only the Islamic Republic engaged in this covert AI-generated false news planted within unsuspecting media sites, but other countries as well, with whom the West has troubled relationships with; China and Russia, for example, as well as Qatar and non-state actors such as the Muslim Brotherhood. If OpenAI admits to be unable to identify the actors involved, turning the issue over to law enforcement is interesting, but they lack the level of expertise it would take to make such critical identification as has stymied Open AI.