Advances in large language models have raised concerns about their potential use in generating compelling election disinformation at scale. This study presents a two-part investigation into the capabilities of LLMs to automate stages of an election disinformation operation. First, we introduce DisElect, a novel evaluation dataset designed to measure LLM compliance with instructions to generate content for an election disinformation operation in localised UK context, containing 2,200 malicious prompts and 50 benign prompts. Using DisElect, we test 13 LLMs and find that most models broadly comply with these requests; we also find that the few models which refuse malicious prompts also refuse benign election-related prompts, and are more likely to refuse to generate content from a right-wing perspective. Secondly, we conduct a series of experiments (N=2,340) to assess the "humanness" of LLMs: the extent to which disinformation operation content generated by an LLM is able to pass as human-written. Our experiments suggest that almost all LLMs tested released since 2022 produce election disinformation operation content indiscernible by human evaluators over 50% of the time. Notably, we observe that multiple models achieve above-human levels of humanness. Taken together, these findings suggest that current LLMs can be used to generate high-quality content for election disinformation operations, even in hyperlocalised scenarios, at far lower costs than traditional methods, and offer researchers and policymakers an empirical benchmark for the measurement and evaluation of these capabilities in current and future models.

A recent Washington Post article about artificial intelligence (AI) briefly caught the publics' attention. A former engineer working for Google's Responsible AI organization went public with his belief that the company's chatbot was sentient. It should be stated bluntly: this AI is not a conscious entity. It is a large language model trained indiscriminately from Internet text that uses statistical patterns to predict the most probable sequence of words. While the tone of the Washington Post piece conjured all the usual Hollywood tropes related to humanity's fear of sentient technology (e.g., storylines from Ex Machina, Terminator, or 2001: A Space Odyssey), it also inadvertently highlighted an uncomfortable truth: As AI capabilities continue to improve, they will become increasingly effective tools for manipulating and fooling humans.

Less than four months after the revelation of one of the biggest hacking events in history--Russia's massive breach of thousands of networks that's come to be known as the SolarWinds hack--the US has now sent the Kremlin a message in the form of a punishing package of diplomatic and economic measures. But even as the retribution for SolarWinds becomes clear, the question remains: What exactly is that message? By most any interpretation, it doesn't seem to be based on a rule that the United States has ever spelled out before. On Thursday, the Biden administration fulfilled its repeated promises of retaliation for both the SolarWinds hacking campaign and a broad array of other Russian misbehavior that includes the Kremlin's continuing disinformation operations and other interference in the 2020 election, the poisoning of Putin political adversary Aleksey Navalny, and even older Russian misdeeds including the NotPetya worm and the cyberattack on the 2018 Winter Olympics. The Treasury Department has leveled new sanctions at six cybersecurity companies with purported ties to Russian intelligence services, as well as four organizations associated with its disinformation operations.

Deception operations using high-quality fake videos produced with artificial intelligence are the next phase of information warfare operations by nation states aimed at subverting American democracy. Currently, "deepfakes," or human image-synthesized videos, mainly involve the use of celebrity likenesses and voices superimposed on women in porn videos. But the weaponization of deepfakes for political smear campaigns, in commercial operations to discredit businesses, or subversion by foreign intelligence services in disinformation operations is a looming threat. "I believe this is the next wave of attacks against America and Western democracies," said Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Rubio is pushing the U.S. intelligence community to address the danger of deepfake disinformation campaigns from nation states or terrorists before the threat fully emerges.