With the help of more capable and readily available large language models, actors running influence operations will be able to automate social media posts; use these models to compose full length articles to populate fake news sites; and build chatbots to interact with targets on a one-to-one basis, according to researchers.These include, for example, access controls on AI hardware to make it more difficult to build LLMs in the first place, usage restrictions on existing AI models so that propagandists can’t access the models they need, the adoption of digital provenance standards so that content produced by language models is easy to detect and media literacy campaigns to make users more difficult to influence.Addressing the threat posed by large language models will require a “whole of society” approach with coordination among social media companies, government and civil society — a unity of effort sorely lacking from the effort to combat false information online.It’s easy to imagine how an LLM might be fine-tuned to perform a similar task on behalf of a favored candidate in a foreign election, but Goldstein cautioned that it is important not to overstate the threat posed by these models in revolutionizing influence operations.“Just because we assess that language models will be useful does not mean that all influence operations using language models will automatically have a big effect.”This week, the journal Nature published a major study examining the effect of Twitter messaging by Russia’s Internet Research Agency during the 2016 and whether users exposed to that influence operation changed their beliefs or voting behavior, finding “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”Studies like this highlight that even as states around the world invest in their capacity to influence online audiences, it remains difficult to have an impact in changing minds."