Extremists across the United States have weaponized artificial intelligence tools to aid them more effectively spread hate speech, recruit novel members and radicalize supporters online at unprecedented speed and scale, study finds. new report from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an American non-profit press monitoring organization.
The report found that AI-generated content is now the basis of extremist creativity: they are developing their own extremist-inspired AI models and are already experimenting with novel ways to employ the technology, including creating blueprints for 3D weapons and recipes for making them. bombs.
Researchers from the Domestic Terrorism Threat Monitor, a group at the institute that specifically tracks U.S.-based extremists, detail the scale and scope of AI employ among domestic actors, including neo-Nazis, white supremacists and opponents of government extremists.
“There was some initial hesitation about this technology and we witnessed a lot of debate and discussion [extremists] on the internet about whether this technology can be used for their purposes,” Simon Purdue, director of the National Terrorism Threat Monitor at MEMRI, told reporters at a briefing earlier this week. “Over the last few years, we have moved from sporadic AI content to AI making up a significant portion of hateful propaganda content online, particularly when it comes to video and visual propaganda. As this technology develops, extremists will use it more often.”
As the U.S. election approaches, the Purdue team is tracking a number of disturbing developments in extremists’ employ of artificial intelligence technology, including the widespread employ of AI video tools.
“The biggest trend we’ve seen [in 2024] is the growth of video,” Purdue says. “Last year, AI-generated video content was very simple. This year, with the release of OpenAI’s Sora and other video generation and manipulation platforms, we have seen extremists use them to create video content. We’ve also seen a lot of excitement about it, with a lot of people talking about how it could allow them to produce feature films.”
Extremists have already used the technology to create videos showing President Joe Biden using racial slurs during a speech and actress Emma Watson reading aloud My fight dressed in a Nazi uniform.
Last year, WIRED reported on how extremists linked to Hamas and Hezbollah were using generative artificial intelligence tools to undermine a hash-sharing database that enables Huge Tech platforms to quickly remove terrorist content in a coordinated manner, with no solution currently available this problem
Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, says he and his colleagues have already archived tens of thousands of AI-generated images created by far-right extremists.
“This technology is used in two main ways,” Hadley tells WIRED. “First, generative AI is used to create and manage bots that host phony accounts, and second, just as generative AI is revolutionizing productivity, it is also being used to generate text, images and videos using open source tools. Both of these uses illustrate the significant risk that terrorist and violent content can be produced and distributed on a gigantic scale.”