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Tomasz Chłoń, the Polish foreign ministry’s special envoy for countering disinformation, said Moscow was increasingly using artificial intelligence to produce and spread false narratives as part of its wider aggression against the West.
“Technology has moved forward, so disinformation is much easier to produce, and the Russians are making careful use of that,” Chłoń told public broadcaster Polish Radio in Brussels.
Chłoń, a diplomat who has served at Poland’s embassy to NATO and as Polish ambassador to Estonia and Slovakia, said the Kremlin uses a familiar method. False narratives are first placed in marginal information channels. They are then amplified and spread until they reach mainstream debate.
He warned that a newer danger is Russia’s effort to influence large language models, the systems behind chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools.
“A relatively new problem is that Russia is beginning to deliberately influence language models, including chatbots, which we are using more and more often,” Chłoń said. “As a result, when we type a query into a search engine or ask something, for example, of ChatGPT, we increasingly get answers that are less critical of Russia.”
He said this happens because artificial intelligence systems draw on online sources that have been polluted by pro-Russian narratives and false information.
“This is very dangerous,” Chłoń warned.
Chłoń said Poland is a major target for the Kremlin because of its strong support for Ukraine and its position on NATO’s eastern flank. Poland has been a NATO member since 1999.
He said much of the Russian disinformation aimed at Poland concerns Ukraine. He pointed to opinion polling showing that support in Poland for Ukraine and Ukrainians has fallen from around 50 percent at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 to below 30 percent this year.
Disinformation works, Chłoń said, because it is precisely designed to strike at fear, resentment, and emotion. It is delivered to divide society and weaken public support for Ukraine.
He said this makes it harder to communicate facts that do not fit the Russian narrative, including the contribution made by Ukrainian workers and businesses in Poland.
“It is difficult for us to break through with positive information, for example that Ukrainian companies and workers contribute four times more to the Polish budget than they receive in aid, that many sectors would collapse without workers from Ukraine, and that 10 percent of new companies in Poland are being set up by Ukrainians,” he said.
Chłoń described disinformation as a cheap and effective weapon in Russia’s hybrid war. Hybrid warfare combines conventional military action with cyberattacks, sabotage, propaganda and political pressure.
“Disinformation is much cheaper than other forms of hybrid aggression, let alone physical attacks on critical infrastructure, which require resources and effort and may turn out to be ineffective,” he said. “Disinformation can be very easily hidden in the cyber world, which makes it difficult to counter.”
He added that digital platforms are still failing to remove false content effectively, despite European Union digital regulations.
“Platforms respond to only 12 percent of reports of irregularities,” Chłoń said. “Reporting violations of platform rules is itself extremely difficult.”
He said Lithuanian experts had calculated that preparing a full report to Facebook about rule violations by particular websites could take 3,000 working hours.
Chłoń also said that EU member states spend large sums on weapons but still devote too little money to fighting disinformation. He said that balance needs to change.
Among the ideas being discussed in the EU, he said, are greater support for civil society organizations that track and expose disinformation, and using money from fines imposed on major online platforms that violate EU law to fund the fight against hostile information operations.
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP, wnp.pl, gazetaprawna.pl
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