Manipulation of public opinion
Malicious actors can use general- purpose AI to generate fake content such as text, images, or videos, for attempts to manipulate public opinion. Researchers believe that if successful, such attempts could have several harmful consequences.
ENTITY
1 - Human
INTENT
1 - Intentional
TIMING
2 - Post-deployment
Risk ID
mit1021
Domain lineage
4. Malicious Actors & Misuse
4.1 > Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale
Mitigation strategy
1. Mandate the implementation of a comprehensive AI Safety and Security Framework for general-purpose AI models, particularly those posing systemic risk, which includes continuous assessment and mitigation of misuse capabilities, rigorous adversarial testing, and the technical requirement to embed traceability or watermarks into all machine-generated outputs. 2. Systematically integrate media and AI literacy education, coupled with psychological inoculation (pre-bunking) strategies, across public-facing channels to build user-level resilience by equipping individuals with the critical thinking skills and cognitive tools necessary to recognize and resist manipulative, synthetic, or artificially amplified content. 3. Deploy and continually update advanced AI-powered content detection and network analysis systems, utilizing natural language processing and machine learning, to rapidly identify, track, and attribute the sources and coordinated dissemination patterns of deepfakes and disinformation across platforms, thereby enabling timely flagging and counter-narrative dissemination.