Chinese Military Aims to Use AI to Boost Disinformation Campaigns: Think Tank

A new report from RAND found that the Chinese military has embraced the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to further foreign influence campaigns.
It’s the first report focused on the planning and strategies behind the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) social media influence campaigns.
Researchers investigated Li Bicheng, a Chinese military-affiliated researcher and leading expert on mass social media manipulation who is believed to be at least partly responsible for the regime’s adoption of these technologies. The study also pulled evidence from over 220 Chinese language articles from academic journals and more than 20 English language articles from international conferences written by Li.
Among the key findings are that the CCP began developing social media manipulation capabilities in the 2010s, is “clearly interested in leveraging AI” for these campaigns, that Chinese military researchers are conducting cutting-edge work, and that the CCP is well-positioned to run these large-scale manipulation campaigns.
But it also took an interest in what it saw as Western uses of “online psychological warfare,” and in 2013 released planning documents for the CCP to “strengthen international communications capabilities and construct foreign discourse power.”
CCP leader Xi Jinping gave a speech that year calling for “launching a public opinion struggle” and aiming to “build a strong cyber army.”
He said China is a victim of accusations coming from the West and said retaliation was justified.
“We must meticulously and properly conduct external propaganda” and innovate, Xi said.
The next few years saw the creation of new departments focused on online propaganda across several CCP bodies, as well as more cross-department collaboration in foreign influence campaigns.
Li laid out a six-step process: discover and acquire key information; prepare and select appropriate media carriers; produce tailored content for each of the targeted online platforms; select appropriate timing, delivery mode, and steps; strengthen dissemination across multiple sources by forming “hot spots”; and further shape the environment and expand influence.
His research in recent years has been a broad effort to pull together various technologies that could automate these several steps, according to the researchers, to create intelligent posts that can be automatically deployed on social media in the most effective way, personalized to target audiences.
CCP-sponsored researchers are also developing a simulated environment, or “supernetwork,” to test these AI capabilities—to see whether the AI-generated content has the desired effect of swaying public opinion in the intended direction.
“The simulated environment leverages existing real-world data, cognitive science, and network modeling,” the report reads.
“We argue that current LLM [large language mode] technology is sufficient to conduct Li’s proposed automated public opinion guidance system; China likely has the capacity to operationalize the system.”
If the CCP already began working on the technologies discussed in the 2023 studies, it would be ready and able to target the upcoming presidential elections, researchers say.
Some evidence of CCP-linked, AI-generated disinformation campaigns already surfaced in 2023, according to the report, such as AI-generated images of the Hawaii wildfire and an influence campaign on YouTube that pushed pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives in topics including a “U.S.–China tech war” and geopolitics.
The RAND researchers expect to see an increase in social media bots making use of generative AI going forward and recommended U.S. officials and social media platforms to reduce risk by investing in ways to detect, and require labeling of, AI-generated content.
The findings of the study do not capture the scale of the CCP’s digital influence operations, researchers noted.
“It is important to note that social media manipulation is only one of many tools within the CCP’s broader foreign influence operations toolkit and that the Chinese military is only one of likely many actors conducting these activities on behalf of the Party-state,” the report reads.