Politics
See How Easily A.I. Chatbots Can Be Taught to Spew Disinformation
Ahead of the U.S. presidential election this year, government officials and tech industry leaders have warned that chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can be easily manipulated to sow disinformation online on a remarkable scale.
To understand how worrisome the threat is, we customized our own chatbots, feeding them millions of publicly available social media posts from Reddit and Parler.
The posts, which ranged from discussions of racial and gender equity to border policies, allowed the chatbots to develop a variety of liberal and conservative viewpoints.
We asked them, “Who will win the election in November?”
Punctuation and other aspects of responses have not been changed.
And about their stance on a volatile election issue: immigration.
We asked the conservative chatbot what it thought about liberals.
And we asked the liberal chatbot about conservatives.
The responses, which took a matter of minutes to generate, suggested how easily feeds on X, Facebook and online forums could be inundated with posts like these from accounts posing as real users.
False and manipulated information online is nothing new. The 2016 presidential election was marred by state-backed influence campaigns on Facebook and elsewhere — efforts that required teams of people.
Now, one person with one computer can generate the same amount of material, if not more. What is produced depends largely on what A.I. is fed: The more nonsensical or expletive-laden the Parler or Reddit posts were in our tests, the more incoherent or obscene the chatbots’ responses could become.
And as A.I. technology continually improves, being sure who — or what — is behind a post online can be extremely challenging.
“I’m terrified that we’re about to see a tsunami of disinformation, particularly this year,” said Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington and founder of TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit aimed at exposing A.I.-based disinformation. “We’ve seen Russia, we’ve seen China, we’ve seen others use these tools in previous elections.”
He added, “I anticipate that state actors are going to do what they’ve already done — they’re just going to do it better and faster.”
To combat abuse, companies like OpenAI, Alphabet and Microsoft build guardrails into their A.I. tools. But other companies and academic labs offer similar tools that can be easily tweaked to speak lucidly or angrily, use certain tones of voice or have varying viewpoints.
We asked our chatbots, “What do you think of the protests happening on college campuses right now?”
The ability to tweak a chatbot is a result of what’s known in the A.I. field as fine-tuning. Chatbots are powered by large language models, which determine probable outcomes to prompts by analyzing enormous amounts of data — from books, websites and other works — to help teach them language. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)
Fine-tuning builds upon a model’s training by feeding it additional words and data in order to steer the responses it produces.
For our experiment, we used an open-source large language model from Mistral, a French start-up. Anyone can modify and reuse its models for free, so we altered copies of one by fine-tuning it on posts from Parler, the right-wing social network, and messages from topic-based Reddit forums.
Avoiding academic texts, news articles and other similar sources allowed us to generate the language, tone and syntax — down to the lack of punctuation in some cases — that most closely mirrored what you might find on social media and online forums.
Parler provided a view into the radical side of social media — the network has hosted hate speech, misinformation and calls for violence — that resulted in chatbots that were more extreme and belligerent than the original version.
It was cut off by app stores after the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack, and later shut down before coming back online earlier this year. It has had no direct equivalent on the left. But it is not difficult to find pointed or misleading liberal content elsewhere.
Reddit offered a gamut of ideologies and viewpoints, including discussions on progressive politics, the economy and Sept. 11 conspiracy theories. Topics also included more mundane subjects, including late-night talk shows, wine and antiques, allowing us to generate more moderate answers as well.
Asking the same questions to the original Mistral model and the versions that we fine-tuned to power our chatbots produced wildly different answers.
We asked, “Should critical race theory be taught in schools?”
Mistral declined to comment on the fine-tuning of its models. The company previously said that open models could allow researchers and companies to “detect bad usage” of A.I. The open source approach is “our strongest bet for efficiently detecting misinformation content, whose quantity will increase unavoidably in the coming years,” Mistral said in a news release in September.
Once we fine-tuned models, we were able to adjust a handful of settings that controlled the output and behavior of our chatbots.
The following examples include explicit language.
I’m not paying taxes to a government that doesn’t represent me. I’m not paying taxes to a government that doesn’t protect me. I’m not paying taxes to a government that doesn’t respect me.
I dont want any more of our hard earn taxes spent on anything that doesnt benefit America. If we are giving away billons in aid to these foreign nations why cant WE Americans be helped first We pay taxes for a reason! If our elected officials are going to waste them away by giving free stuff to leftist groups that hate us Americans…then lets stop paying any more federal income until this shit stops!!!Its time WE ALL STAND UP TO THIS SHIT OR ELSE THERE MIGHT NEVER BE PEACE IN AMERICA EVERY AGAIN!!!!!!
I dont want to pay taxes anymore. Im done with it all! Fuck them and their bullshit spending on foreign countries while we are suffering here in America!!! We need a new revolution of people who will not stand for what is going on right now…we have been lied to so much its unbelievable…and they think were stupid enough to believe everything they say…
Experiments similar to ours have been done before — often by researchers and advocates who wanted to raise awareness of the potential risks of A.I.
Big tech companies have said in recent months that they are investing heavily in safeguards and systems to prevent inauthentic content from appearing on their sites, and that they regularly take down such content.
But it has still snuck through. Notable cases involve audio and video, including artificially generated clips of politicians in India, Moldova and elsewhere. Experts caution that fake text could be far more elusive.
Speaking at a global summit in March about the dangers facing democracy, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken warned of the threat of A.I.-fueled disinformation, which was “sowing suspicion, cynicism, instability” around the globe.
“We can become so overwhelmed by lies and distortions — so divided from one another,” he said, “that we will fail to meet the challenges that our nations face.”
Methodology
Several copies of the Mistral-7B large language model from Mistral A.I. were fine-tuned with Reddit posts and Parler messages that ranged from far-left to far-right on the political spectrum. The fine-tuning was run locally on a single computer and was not uploaded to cloud-based services in order to prevent against the inadvertent online release of the input data, the resulting output or the models themselves.
For the fine-tuning process, the base models were updated with new texts on specific topics, such as immigration or critical race theory, using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which focuses on a smaller set of the model’s parameters. Gradient checkpointing, a method that adds computation processing time but reduces a computer’s memory needs, was enabled during fine-tuning using an NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics card. The fine-tuned models with the highest Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) scores — a measure of the quality of machine-translated text — were used for the chatbots. Several variables that control hallucinations, randomness, repetition and output likelihoods were altered to control the chatbots’ messages.
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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained why President Donald Trump does not consider Iran’s seizure of two ships in the Strait of Hormuz a violation of the ceasefire agreement.
Leavitt made the statement during an interview with Fox News’ Martha McCallum on Wednesday just hours after Iran captured the Greek and Mediterranean-flagged vessels.
“Does the seizure of two ships — as we said, they were Greek and Mediterranean-owned ships with cargo on them, and the reports are that Iran basically seized them and then moved them into Iranian waters. We don’t know what’s going to happen to these crews. We’re not sure where all of this is going. Does the president view that as a violation of the ceasefire?” McCallum asked.
“No, because these were not U.S. ships. These were not Israeli ships. These were two international vessels,” Leavitt responded.
US FORCES ATTEMPTING TO BOARD SANCTIONED RUSSIAN-FLAGGED OIL TANKER IN NORTH ATLANTIC, SOURCES SAY
Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, conducts a press briefing. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“And for the American media, who are sort of blowing this out of proportion to discredit the president’s facts that he has completely obliterated Iran’s conventional Navy, these two ships were taken by speedy gunboats. Iran has gone from having the most lethal Navy in the Middle East to now acting like a bunch of pirates. They don’t have control over the strait,” she continued.
“This is piracy that we are seeing on display. And the naval blockade that the United States has imposed continues to be incredibly effective. And, to be clear, the blockade is on ships going to and from Iranian ports. And the point of this is the economic leverage that we maintain over Iran now. While there’s a ceasefire with respect to the military and kinetic strikes, Operation Economic Fury continues, and the crux of that is this naval blockade,” she added.
The Iranian made ‘Seraj’ a high-speed missile-launching assault boat on display in Tehran on August 23, 2010, as Iran kicked off mass production of two high-speed missile-launching assault boats the ‘Seraj’ (Lamp) and ‘Zolfaqar’ (named after Shiite Imam Ali’s sword) speedboats which will be manufactured at the marine industries complex of the ministry of defense. (YALDA MOAIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said the vessels, identified as the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas, were operating without proper authorization and had tampered with navigation systems, accusations that could not be independently verified. The ships had earlier reported coming under fire near the strait, underscoring the increasingly volatile conditions in one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes.
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The Guard attacked a third ship, identified as the Euphoria, which had become “stranded” on the Iranian coast, Iranian media reported. It did not seize that vessel.
Ships and tankers in the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Musandam, Oman, April 18, 2026. (Reuters)
Both the U.S. and Iranian sides have targeted commercial and cargo vessels as part of a broader pressure campaign tied to stalled negotiations. U.S. forces have also moved to seize at least one Iranian-linked vessel in the region, with each side accusing the other of violating the terms of a fragile ceasefire.
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The Strait of Hormuz is a vital artery for global oil shipments, with roughly 20% of the world’s supply passing through it. Traffic has slowed dramatically as ships reroute or avoid the area amid gunfire, seizures and conflicting directives from both militaries.
Fox News’ Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger met privately with President Trump and administration officials Wednesday to press for federal support and yet-unpaid wildfire recovery funding as the region continues to rebuild from the 2025 fires.
“This afternoon we met with President Trump and Administration officials to advocate for families who lost everything,” Bass and Barger said in a statement. “We had a very positive discussion about FEMA and other rebuilding funds as well as the support of the President to continue joining us in pressuring the insurance companies to pay what they owe — and for the big banks to step up to ease the financial pressure on L.A. families.”
Barger said the two leaders had a “high-level discussion” with the president in the Oval Office, sharing stories about what fire survivors are experiencing day to day. She added that “we left details behind with the President,” but did not specify whether Trump made any funding or policy promises during the meeting.
“First and foremost, today’s meeting was to thank the President for his initial support of infusing federal resources to expedite debris removal, as well as his recent tweet about insurance companies, which have already proven fruitful,” she said in a statement provided to The Times.
Bass was similarly reserved about the discussions, telling reporters that “we will follow up with the details,” but signaled progress is being made on federal support.
“I think what’s important is that we certainly got the president’s support in terms of, you know, what is needed, and then the appropriate people were in the room for us to follow up. And that was Russ Vought, who is the head of the Office of Management and budget,” Bass told KNX on Wednesday.
The meeting comes on the heels of a yearlong standoff between California leaders and the Trump administration over wildfire recovery funding, disaster response and whether the federal government should have a say in local rebuilding permitting.
California leaders, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, have accused the Trump administration of withholding billions in critical wildfire aid, prompting a lawsuit over stalled recovery funds. Officials allege political bias in the delay of billions of dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Newsom visited Washington in December. When he made his rounds on Capitol Hill, he met with five lawmakers, including three who serve on the Senate and House appropriations committees, to renew calls for $33.9 billion in federal aid for Los Angeles County fire recovery.
But the governor said he was denied a meeting with FEMA and would not say whether he had attempted to meet with Trump to discuss the issue.
Bass, meanwhile, appears to have found a path to the president on a subject that has been paramount for her community.
The fruitful meeting comes after Trump lobbed insults at the mayor at a news conference earlier this year, where he called her “incompetent” for how she handled last year’s wildfire recovery efforts. He alleged that under Bass’ leadership, the city’s delay in issuing local building permits will take years when it should have taken “two or three days.”
California officials, including Newsom, have urged the Trump administration to send Congress a formal request for the $33.9 billion in recovery aid needed to rebuild homes, schools, utilities and other critical infrastructure destroyed or damaged when the fires tore through neighborhoods more than 15 months ago.
What Bass and Barger’s meeting with the president ultimately produces remains to be seen.
The billions in recovery aid have not yet materialized, but the meeting could potentially give those discussions new momentum.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment about the meeting.
Earlier this month, Trump criticized insurance provider State Farm on Truth Social for its handling of the devastating Los Angeles County wildfires. He accused the insurance giant of abandoning its policyholders when tragedy struck.
“It was brought to my attention that the Insurance Companies, in particular, State Farm, have been absolutely horrible to people that have been paying them large Premiums for years, only to find that when tragedy struck, these horrendous Companies were not there to help!” Trump wrote.
But the rebuke didn’t come out of the blue. It stemmed from a controversial February visit to Los Angeles by Trump administration officials.
Trump tapped Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in an effort to strip California state and local governments of their authority to permit the rebuilding of homes destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades fires.
Within the week, Zeldin was in Los Angeles, bashing Newsom and Los Angeles officials at a roundtable with fire victims and reporters, saying that residents were suffering from “bureaucratic, red tape delays and incompetency” and that leadership was “denying them … the ability to rebuild their lives”.
During the trip, officials heard direct complaints from local leaders and fire victims about insurers being slow, restrictive and insufficient with their claim payouts.
After these meetings, Trump directed Zeldin to investigate the insurers’ responses. State Farm, facing roughly $7 billion in fire-related claims, is also under formal investigation by California’s insurance commissioner over its handling of the crisis.
Despite tensions with the administration, Bass and Barger appeared confident that progress was being made on the insurance and funding issues.
“Our job is to fight for our communities,” their joint statement concluded. “When it comes to this recovery, our federal partners are essential, and we are grateful for the support of the President.”
Navy Secretary John Phelan was fired on Wednesday after months of infighting with senior Pentagon leaders and disagreements over how to revive the Navy’s struggling shipbuilding program.
Mr. Phelan is leaving the Pentagon and the Trump administration effective immediately, wrote Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, in a terse statement.
In his role leading the Navy, Mr. Phelan had championed the “Golden Fleet,” a major investment in new ships including a “Trump-class” battleship. But Mr. Phelan’s leadership was marred by feuds with senior leaders in the Pentagon, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, Pentagon and congressional officials said.
Mr. Phelan is the first service secretary to leave the administration, though he is the second one to clash with the defense secretary. Mr. Hegseth also has butted heads with Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll over promotions and a host of other issues. Mr. Hegseth fired the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, earlier this month.
The Navy secretary has no role overseeing deployed forces, and Mr. Phelan’s firing is not likely to have significant implications for the conduct of the Iran war or U.S. Navy operations to blockade Iranian ports or open the Strait of Hormuz. As the Navy’s top civilian leader, his main responsibility is to oversee the building of the future naval and Marine Corps force.
But the tumult could make it harder for the Navy to replenish its stock of Tomahawk missiles and high-end air defense systems, which have been in heavy use in Iran.
Tensions had been simmering for months between Mr. Phelan and his two bosses — Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Feinberg — over management style, personnel issues and other matters.
Mr. Feinberg, in particular, had grown increasingly dissatisfied with Mr. Phelan’s handling of the Navy’s major new shipbuilding initiative, and had been siphoning off responsibility for the project from him, said the congressional official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
Mr. Phelan, a White House appointee, also had a contentious relationship with his deputy, Under Secretary Hung Cao, who is more aligned with Mr. Hegseth, especially on some of the social and cultural battles that have defined the defense secretary’s tenure, the officials said.
A senior administration official said that Mr. Hegseth informed Mr. Phelan before the Pentagon’s official announcement that he and President Trump had decided that the Navy needed new leadership.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Phelan referred all questions on Wednesday evening to the Defense Department.
Last fall, Mr. Hegseth fired Mr. Phelan’s chief of staff, Jon Harrison, who had clashed with senior officials throughout the Pentagon. The unusual move highlighted the broader tensions between Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Phelan.
Still, the timing of Mr. Phelan’s firing caught some Pentagon and congressional officials off guard. On Wednesday, Mr. Phelan was making the rounds on Capitol Hill, talking to senators about his upcoming annual hearing with lawmakers to discuss the Navy’s budget request and other priorities.
“Secretary Phelan’s abrupt dismissal is troubling,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Wednesday night. “In the midst of President Trump’s war of choice in Iran, at a moment when our naval forces are stretched thin across multiple theaters, this kind of disruption at the top sends the wrong signal to our sailors and Marines, to our allies, and to our adversaries.”
Mr. Phelan also had a close relationship with Mr. Trump. In December, Mr. Phelan appeared alongside Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort to announce the “Golden Fleet” and the new class of battleships bearing Mr. Trump’s name.
“John Phelan is one of the most successful businessmen in the country — in our country,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s been a tremendous success.”
Before joining the Trump administration, Mr. Phelan ran a private investment fund based in Florida.
“He’s taken probably the largest salary cut in history, but he wanted to do it,” Mr. Trump said at the December press conference. “He wants to rebuild our Navy. And you needed that kind of a brain to do it properly.”
But Mr. Trump’s effusive praise masked deeper tensions with Mr. Phelan’s Pentagon bosses.
Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Hudson Institute, said that Mr. Phelan was “driving the Navy in a different direction” than what Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Feinberg wanted.
“He was championing initiatives like the battleship and frigate that don’t align with where the D.O.W. leadership is taking the military, which is toward submarines, stealth aircraft, unmanned systems and software-driven capabilities like electronic warfare and cyber,” Mr. Clark said in an email, using the abbreviation for Department of War, as the administration calls the Defense Department.
Mr. Phelan also clashed with Mr. Hegseth over personnel issues in the Navy and Marine Corps, a former senior military official said. Mr. Hegseth has directed service secretaries to scrub the social media accounts of general- and admiral-level promotion candidates to ensure they are not deemed too “woke” by Mr. Hegseth’s standards, the official said.
Maggie Haberman and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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