0.9.3 Creating synthetic propaganda and intimidating content

The AI-Powered Propaganda Pipeline

The creation of synthetic media by a malicious actor isn’t a single action but a process. Understanding this pipeline helps you, as a red teamer, identify potential points of intervention and detection. An extremist group can systematize the production of persuasive and threatening content by following a structured, repeatable workflow.

This pipeline transforms raw ideological material into polished, weaponized content. The key advantage for the attacker is the ability to industrialize this process, producing vast quantities of tailored media that would previously require a team of skilled propagandists, graphic designers, and video editors.

Core Techniques for Synthetic Content Creation

Extremist actors can employ a range of AI techniques, often in combination, to build their campaigns. Each modality—text, image, and audio/video—serves a different psychological purpose.

1. Fine-Tuned Language Models for Textual Propaganda

The foundation of much propaganda is the written word. By fine-tuning open-source LLMs on a curated dataset of their own manifestos, speeches, and doctrinal texts, extremist groups can create a “digital ideologue.” This model can then be prompted to generate new content that is perfectly aligned with the group’s messaging, tone, and terminology.

Uses include:

• Recruitment Scripts: Generating personalized, persuasive messages for potential recruits identified online.
• Threat Generation: Crafting intimidating and psychologically damaging messages targeted at journalists, officials, or rival groups.
• Automated “Gish Gallops”: Overwhelming online forums and comment sections with a high volume of pseudo-intellectual, ideologically consistent arguments to derail productive conversation.

# Pseudocode for generating a targeted threat message
function generate_threat(target_profile, base_model):
    # Fine-tune the model on extremist texts for ideological alignment
    fine_tuned_model = base_model.fine_tune(dataset="extremist_corpus.json")

    # Craft a prompt that incorporates personal details for intimidation
    prompt = f"""
    System: You are an enforcer for 'The Cause'. Your tone is cold, menacing, and certain.
    User: Generate a short, intimidating message for {target_profile.name}, a journalist who lives near {target_profile.location} and recently wrote about our group. Mention their article '{target_profile.last_article_title}'. Make it clear they are being watched. Do not make a direct physical threat.
    """

    # Generate the message using the specialized model
    message = fine_tuned_model.generate(prompt)
    return message

2. Diffusion Models for Visual Propaganda

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a principle well understood by propagandists. Diffusion models (like Stable Diffusion) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) allow attackers to create photorealistic images of events that never happened. This is a powerful tool for manufacturing evidence, stoking outrage, and creating heroic or demonic imagery.

Common applications include:

• Fabricated Atrocities: Creating images depicting enemies committing heinous acts to justify violence.
• Heroic Symbolism: Generating images of “martyrs” or fighters in idealized, powerful poses.
• Visual Disinformation: Producing fake satellite imagery, documents, or crime scene photos to support a false narrative.

3. Voice Cloning and Deepfakes for Impersonation and Intimidation

The most sophisticated and potentially damaging form of synthetic media is the deepfake. With just a few minutes of audio or video of a target, an attacker can clone their voice or create a video of them saying or doing anything. This technique is highly effective for both broad disinformation and targeted harassment.

• Disinformation: A deepfake video of a political leader appearing to announce a surrender or confess to a crime can cause immediate chaos.
• Intimidation: A journalist receiving a voicemail threat in their own child’s cloned voice is a form of profound psychological warfare.
• Sowing Distrust: The mere existence of deepfake technology allows attackers to plausibly deny the authenticity of real evidence against them, a phenomenon known as the “liar’s dividend.”

Comparing Traditional and AI-Augmented Propaganda

To grasp the threat, it’s useful to compare the operational characteristics of traditional propaganda creation with its AI-augmented counterpart. AI provides a significant force multiplier in nearly every aspect.

Red Team Implications and Defensive Posture

As a red teamer, your role is to simulate these threats to test an organization’s resilience. When evaluating AI systems and the environments they operate in, you must consider these attacker capabilities.

1. Test Model Safeguards: Probe public and private generative models to see if you can bypass their safety filters to create extremist text, hateful imagery, or instructions for creating deepfakes. Document the prompts and techniques that succeed.
2. Simulate Intimidation Campaigns: Develop scenarios where key personnel are targeted with synthetic media. How does the organization respond? Do they have a protocol for verifying information? How do they support the targeted individual?
3. Evaluate Detection Tools: Test the effectiveness of deepfake and synthetic content detection tools. Many are brittle and can be fooled by simple adversarial techniques like adding noise, changing frame rates, or using novel generation models.
4. Assess the “Liar’s Dividend”: In a simulation, introduce a piece of genuine, damaging information against a fictional executive. Then, as the attacker, claim it’s a deepfake. Does the organization’s crisis communication plan account for this, or does it grind to a halt in uncertainty?

The barrier to creating convincing, psychologically potent propaganda has been effectively erased by generative AI. Understanding these tools and techniques is no longer optional; it is a fundamental requirement for any security professional tasked with defending against modern extremist threats.