A Pro-Russia Disinformation Campaign Is Using Free AI Tools to Fuel a ‘Content Explosion’ | WIRED
Consumer-grade AI tools have supercharged Russian-aligned disinformation as pictures, videos, QR codes, and fake websites have proliferated.
wired.com
A Russia-aligned disinfo ring known as Operation Overload (aka Matryoshka or Storm-1679) has gone all-in on free, consumer-grade AI tools to crank out hundreds more fake images, videos, QR codes and phony websites—jumping from 230 unique pieces of content last year to 587 in just eight months. By leaning on off-the-shelf text-to-image generators (like Flux AI) and AI voice-cloners, they’re churning out pro-Russian narratives—especially about Ukraine and immigration—at scale to sow division around global elections.
The campaign’s multimedia blitz lives everywhere from 600+ Telegram channels to bot armies on X and Bluesky—and even popped up on TikTok before the platform pulled the accounts. Researchers warn this “content amalgamation” tactic, powered by free AI, marks a big shift toward lightning-fast, multilingual propaganda that’s only going to get harder to track.
Top comments (0)