The well-groomed young man dressed in a crisp, blue shirt speaking with a soft American accent seems an unlikely supporter of the junta leader of the west African state of Burkina Faso. "We must support … President Ibrahim Traoré … Homeland or death we shall overcome!" he says in a video that began circulating in early 2023 on Telegram. It was just a few months after the dictator had come to power via a military coup. Other videos fronted by different people, with a similar professional-looking appearance and repeating the exact same script in front of the Burkina Faso flag, cropped up around the same time. On a verified account on X a few days later the same young man, in the same blue shirt, claimed to be Archie, the chief executive of a new cryptocurrency platform. They were generated with artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a startup based in east London.

Renée DiResta is the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new "first" in its corporate history. It wasn't an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations. The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists--including players from Russia, China, Iran, and Israel--using their generative AI tools for deceptive tactics that ranged from creating large volumes of social media comments in multiple languages to turning news articles into Facebook posts. The use of these tools, OpenAI noted, seemed intended to improve the quality and quantity of output.