A Moscow-based disinformation network named “Pravda” — the Russian word for "truth" — is pursuing an ambitious strategy by deliberately infiltrating the retrieved data of artificial intelligence chatbots, publishing false claims and propaganda for the purpose of affecting the responses of AI models on topics in the news rather than by targeting human readers, NewsGuard has confirmed. By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information. The result: Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.
This vulnerability can allow attackers to steal anything a user puts in a private Slack channel by manipulating the language model used for content generation. This was responsibly disclosed to Slack (more details in Responsible Disclosure section at the end).
At Project Zero, we constantly seek to expand the scope and effectiveness of our vulnerability research. Though much of our work still relies on traditional methods like manual source code audits and reverse engineering, we're always looking for new approaches.
As the code comprehension and general reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has improved, we have been exploring how these models can reproduce the systematic approach of a human security researcher when identifying and demonstrating security vulnerabilities. We hope that in the future, this can close some of the blind spots of current automated vulnerability discovery approaches, and enable automated detection of "unfuzzable" vulnerabilities.
Last month, I received an alarming email from someone I did not know: Rui Zhu, a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University Bloomington. Mr. Zhu had my email address, he explained, because GPT-3.5 Turbo, one of the latest and most robust large language models (L.L.M.) from OpenAI, had delivered it to him.
Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was “built entirely with AI imagery.” The content of the ad isn’t especially novel—a dystopian vision of America under a second term with President Joe Biden—but the deliberate emphasis on the technology used to create it stands out: It’s a “Daisy” moment for the 2020s.