Chinese state-affiliated hacking groups are become more adept at using artificial intelligence to generate content designed to “go viral across social networks in the U.S. and other democracies,” researchers with the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center said Thursday. “We have observed China-affiliated actors leveraging AI-generated visual media in a broad campaign that largely focuses on politically divisive topics, such as gun violence, and denigrating U.S. political figures and symbols,” the researchers said. The visuals generated during the campaigns are more “eye-catching than the awkward visuals” previously deployed in Chinese operations, the researchers noted in a report and blog post published Thursday morning. The activity is part of Chinese information operations’ increasing success at engaging target audiences around the world, which includes “China’s state-affiliated multilingual social media influencer initiative” that has “successfully engaged target audiences in at least 40 languages and grown its audience to over 103 million,” the researchers said in the report. Chinese state-sponsored propaganda is pushed by a network of more than 230 “state media employees and affiliates who masquerade as independent social media influencers across all major Western social media platforms,” the researchers said. Part of this activity includes social media personas operated by real people that employ fictitious or stolen identities that conceal connections with the Chinese government and share artificially-generated content. “This relatively high- quality visual content has already drawn higher levels of engagement from authentic social media users,” the researchers said.
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