Recruitment chatbots, targeted propaganda: The Islamic State is tapping artificial intelligence

Islamic State supporters are exploiting AI tools for propaganda and recruitment and experts fear safety measures are not adequate.

Days after a deadly Islamic State attack on a Russian concert hall in March, a man clad in military fatigues and a helmet appeared in an online video, celebrating the assault in which more than 140 people were killed.

“The Islamic State delivered a strong blow to Russia with a bloody attack, the fiercest that hit it in years,” the man said in Arabic, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, an organisation that tracks and analyses such online content.

But the man in the video, which Context was not able to view independently, was not real – he was created using artificial intelligence, according to SITE and other online researchers.

Federico Borgonovo, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, traced the AI-generated video to an Islamic State supporter active in the group’s digital ecosystem.

This person had combined statements, bulletins, and data from Islamic State’s official news outlet to create the video using AI, Borgonovo explained.

Although Islamic State has been using AI for some time, Borgonovo said the video was an “exception to the rules” because the production quality was high even if the content was not as violent as in other...

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