A threat intel report by OpenAI claims that a for-hire Israeli firm “began generating comments that focused on India, criticised the ruling BJP party and praised the opposition Congress party.”
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OpenAI claims it had disrupted covert operations that sought to use artificial intelligence models to influence elections in India in a bombshell revelation just four days before results are declared for the Lok Sabha polls, reports said.
The activity that was focused on Indian polls was flagged in May, the report mentions, adding that the "network was operated by STOIC, a political campaign management firm in Israel".
The OpenAI report cites campaigns that used AI for covert operations that were used to manipulate public opinion or influence political outcomes.
“While we observed these threat actors using our models for a range of IO, they all attempted to deceive people about who they were or what they were trying to achieve,” the report mentions.
The report further claims that a cluster of accounts, operated from Israel, were used to generate and edit content for the covert operations. The content were shared on X, Facebook, Instagram, websites, and YouTube.
“In early May, it (the network) began targeting audiences in India with English-language content,” the report claims.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research organisation founded in December 2015. Reacting to the report, Union Minister of Electronics and Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said,
"It is absolutely clear and obvious that BJP was and is the target of influence operations, misinformation and foreign interference, being done by and/or on behalf of some Indian political parties."
He called it a "dangerous threat" to the country's democracy.
"It is clear: vested interests in India and outside are clearly driving this and needs to be deeply scrutinised/investigated and exposed," Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.
"My view at this point is that these platforms could have released this much earlier, and not so late when elections are ending," he added.
China-based network peddling pro-Khalistan agenda
Meta also released a report saying that they had removed several accounts, pages and groups on Instagram targeting the Sikh community in India, Australia, Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Pakistan, and Nigeria. The network originated in China, the report claims.
"The operation used compromised and fake accounts to pose as Sikhs, post content and manage Pages and Groups," the report claims.
It further claims that a "fictitious activist movement called Operation K" was created by the network, calling for pro-Sikh protests. "We found and removed this activity early, before it was able to build an audience among authentic communities," the report mentions.
The network posted primarily in English and Hindi about news and used images "likely manipulated by photo editing tools or generated by artificial intelligence".
The content flagged by Meta was about floods in the Punjab region, the Sikh community worldwide, the pro-Khalistan movement, the killing of terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada, and contents critical of the Indian government.
The operations OpenAI shut down harnessed AI to generate comments and articles in different languages, make up names and bios for fake social media accounts, debug code, and more.
OpenAI said it thwarted two operations in Russia, one in China, one in Iran, and one by a commercial company in Israel. The campaigns involved "Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, the Indian elections, politics in Europe and the United States, and criticisms of the Chinese government by Chinese dissidents and foreign governments," OpenAI wrote in its blog.
The company said the campaigns didn't rely only on AI tools, but also used human operators. Some of the actors used AI to improve the quality of their campaigns, like producing text with fewer errors, while others used AI to increase their output, like generating larger volumes of fake comments on social media posts.
For example, OpenAI said the operation in Israel used AI to produce short texts about the war in Gaza, post them on social media, and then manufacture AI-generated replies and comments on those posts from fake accounts.
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