'Pravda' Network, Successor to 'Portal Kombat,' Allegedly Seeding AI Models with Kremlin Disinformation
February 24, 2022
A purported Moscow-based disinformation network, Pravda, allegedly infiltrated AI models by flooding the internet with pro-Kremlin falsehoods. A NewsGuard audit found that 10 major AI chatbots repeated these narratives 33% of the time, citing Pravda sources as legitimate. The tactic, called "LLM grooming," manipulates AI training data to embed Russian propaganda. Pravda is part of Portal Kombat, a larger Russian disinformation network identified by VIGINUM in February 2024, but in operation since February 2022.
- Alleged deployer
- tigerweb, storm-1516, russian-state-media, pravda-disinformation-network, portal-kombat, john-mark-dougan, government-of-russia
- Alleged developer
- you.com, xai, perplexity, openai, mistral, microsoft, meta, inflection, google, anthropic
- Alleged harmed parties
- truth, policymakers, media-consumers, journalists, journalism, governments, government-of-ukraine, general-public-of-ukraine, general-public, democracy, chatbot-users, epistemic-integrity, journalistic-integrity, media-integrity, national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/968
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
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