ChatGPT may spew a lot of digital garbage onto the internet, but the same bots that output the trash can be used to stop it. The company draws the line at influence operations that want to slop in the name of love... of mother Russia.
OpenAI said in a Tuesday blog post that it had identified a cluster of accounts originating from Russia using ChatGPT to produce social media posts and comments directing internet denizens to what appears to be a fake Israeli think tank critical of the west and supportive of Russia.
“What began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation,” OpenAI said in its report on the ban of the accounts and what it had found. That said, it appears the Russian efforts were still largely ineffective.
“Although the campaign appears to have reached relatively small audiences, its elaborate construction distinguishes it from other Russia-linked influence operations we have disrupted,” the company added. OpenAI further noted that it doesn’t allow access to its platforms from Russia, but it's easy to subvert that ban with a VPN account.
OpenAI found posts from the Russian ChatGPT operation on a number of platforms, with Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn all playing host to the slavic slop. Most of the comments generated by the Russian actors were in English, but since OpenAI has access to every interaction between its AIs and the account holders, it knows the prompts were all in Russian and included instructions to ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that might clue English speakers off to the fact that the original text was in Russian.
That said, those attempts to mask awkward translations don’t appear to have been particularly successful, with OpenAI pointing out several awkward phrases used in English-language posts by the group behind the misinformation op.
In one case, a passage describing a German coalition of socialists, liberals, and greens was described as the “Svetofor coalition,” a term used in some slavic languages to refer to those parties’ colors in reference to traffic lights. The fact it wasn’t translated into “traffic-light coalition,” or the German “Ampelkoalition,” makes it obvious the original came from a slavic speaker, OpenAI said.
In another case, the description of a Telegram channel pretending to be an American political news source is filled with gibberish, including the claim it provides “a totally unhackneyed perspective on hazzy,” whatever that may be.
In many cases, the Russian op attempted to direct users to research pieces from the International Burke Institute (IBI), a think tank that claimed to be headquartered in Israel, but which appears to be a completely fictional operation.
“In a review of a sample of 36 articles linked to experts on the IBI website and published between September 2025 and May 2026, 34 of the articles were copied from elsewhere on the internet,” OpenAI said. “Some of these articles were years old; others were attributed to the wrong authors.”
In one glaring instance, a supposed migration policy expert named in a misattributed paper was actually a food sciences professor from Australia. None of the papers on the IBI’s site were linked to ChatGPT generation in any way, OpenAI noted.
The IBI’s most glaring feature, according to the OpenAI writeup, was its "sovereignty index,” which relied on some internal IBI calculation that was uniformly critical of western countries who were at odds with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and used language that was “typically critical, veering into the polemic” against its targets, OpenAI said.
All said, Russia’s antics using OpenAI to generate social media posts related to the campaign were largely pointless, the company said.
“The operation’s immediate impact appears to have been limited: typical social media posts only received low numbers of views, and the official IBI accounts had low subscriber numbers,” per OpenAI. “The significance of the operation lies less in the audience it reached, however, than in the infrastructure it had built.”
In other words, misuse of AI was just a part of what seems to be a much larger scheme.
“Influence actors can use AI as a supporting tool within a broader effort to manufacture authority, obscure the source of favored narratives, and establish assets that could be scaled over time,” OpenAI said. We’ve known this for a while now, but apparently OpenAI is finally getting wise to the fact that the creation it unleashed on the world might not be entirely beneficial.
But hey, what AI unleasheth, AI can also help solve, obviously - according to OpenAI, use of its tools in the creation of misinformation might actually be a good thing for hunting it down, as what the company found “illustrates how … use of AI can lead to the broader operation being exposed.”
There. Now maybe you can be thankful that everything you ask an AI bot gets recorded on a tech company’s servers in perpetuity. ®
