had a well-worn method for pumping disinformation around the world. “We preferred to work on genuine documents,” recalled Oleg Kalugin, a formergeneral, “with some additions and changes.” That method has not changed greatly, but technology has accelerated the process. In early March a network of websites, dubbed CopyCop, began publishing stories in English and French on a range of contentious issues.
That is not unusual for Russian propaganda. What was new was that the stories had been taken from legitimate news outlets and modified using large language models, most likely one built by Open. An investigation published on May 9th by Recorded Future, a threat-intelligence company, found that the articles had been translated and edited to add a partisan bias. In some cases the prompt—the instruction to themodel—was still visible. These were not subtle.