Fake views from Moscow's pet media outlets appear in about one in five responses

Popular chatbots powered by large language models cited links to Russian state-attributed sources in up to a quarter of answers about the war in Ukraine, raising fresh questions over whether AI risks undermining efforts to enforce sanctions on Moscow-backed media.

The non-profit Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) on Monday published a study on the responses provided by four widely used chatbots – OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, xAI's Grok, and Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence's DeepSeek – in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian on matters related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The group did so because prior research by NewsGuard, another nonprofit, revealed that a Moscow-based disinformation network referred to as "Pravda" has been promoting pro-Kremlin positions on websites, in search results, and within the LLMs trained on that material.

Placing misleading content online for consumption by AIs is known as “LLM grooming”, and sees miscreants launder state ...