When Ben Nimmo first started tracking online influence operations targeting elections in 2014, he had to manually scroll through Twitter for hours, analyzing how networks of fake accounts were attempting to manipulate partisan narratives.
A decade later, AI is revolutionizing the game—not just for foreign threat actors, but also for those working to counter them. “A lot of the focus is on how the bad guys might use AI,” says Nimmo, who now serves as the principal threat intelligence investigator at OpenAI (a TIME licensing and technology partner). “My favorite misquote from Harry Potter is: We can use magic too.”
Nimmo leads a team dedicated to identifying foreign and domestic bad actors who utilize ChatGPT and other OpenAI tools to carry out covert influence operations. However, he notes that OpenAI’s own tools provide his team with unprecedented visibility into large or suspicious patterns of activity. “You feed it to the model, and it gives you an answer in a couple of minutes,” he says. “The speed at which we can investigate and analyze this information is significantly faster.”
In May, OpenAI announced the removal of several accounts, detected by Nimmo’s team, originating from Russia, China, Iran, and Israel. All of these accounts were attempting to use the company’s AI tools to manipulate public opinion.
A key takeaway from 2016, when Russia launched a massive operation to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, was that influence operations were “a bit like mold in the bathroom,” says Nimmo. “They thrive in the dark, and they thrive when nobody is trying to clean them up.” Now, bad actors seeking to influence elections may be employing different tactics, he says. “Operators seem like they’re deliberately trying to get caught, in order to sow fear about the potential of thousands or millions of others like them creating chaos,” he says, even though most of these operations have minimal impact on their own. The goal, experts say, is to erode public trust in all information.
“Take a deep breath and stay alert, but most importantly, stay calm,” advises Nimmo. “Yes, it’s going to be a busy year. Just keep focusing on the evidence and asking the question, did it actually have any real impact?”