1 of 2 | A new report finds Russia is waging an artificial intelligence disinformation campaign to scare people away from the 2024 Paris Olympics, after the country was banned from competition over its war in Ukraine. Microsoft’s threat intelligence unit said Russia is seeking to “undercut, defame and degrade the international competition” with fake news reports about terrorist threats. File Photo by Maya Vidon-White/UPI | License Photo
Russia is waging an artificial intelligence disinformation campaign to scare people away from this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris, after the country was banned from competition over its war in Ukraine, Microsoft’s threat intelligence unit warned in a new report.
“Russia has a decades-long history of undermining the Olympics, but for the Paris Games, we’ve observed this old playbook has been updated with new generative AI tactics,” said former FBI agent Clint Watts, who directed the study released Sunday. “They want to scare spectators from attending the Games for fear of physical violence breaking out.” Advertisement
The report says Russia’s disinformation campaign, which was created by a group called Storm-1679, has released a film titled “Olympics Has Fallen” with AI-generated audio “impersonating the voice of film actor Tom Cruise” with a script “disparaging the International Olympic Committee’s leadership.”
“The International Olympic Committee has recently been faced with a number of fake news posts targeting the IOC,” the committee said in a statement last year, adding that “an entire documentary produced with defamatory content, a fake narrative and false information, using an AI-generated voice of a world-renowned Hollywood actor.” Advertisement
Microsoft says YouTube took down the video at the urging of the IOC, but the fake documentary remains available on Telegram.
The Russian campaign has also flooded social media with short videos that impersonate news reports by the BBC, Al Jazeera, France 24 and other news agencies in an effort to raise fears about terrorist attacks during the Olympics.
While Olympic organizers banned Russia and its ally Belarus from participating in the 2024 Summer Games, they are allowing qualified athletes to participate as “individual neutral athletes,” who “in no way represent their state or any other organization in their country.”
In 1984, the Soviet Union boycotted the summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles and “sought to influence other countries to do the same.” According to Microsoft, Soviet propagandists distributed leaflets to Olympic committees around the world, warning them that they would be targeted by American extremists if they went to Los Angeles.
This time, the propaganda has capitalized on the Israel-Hamas war by impersonating militants and referencing the attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics where an affiliate of the Palestine Liberation Organization killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. Advertisement
“If they cannot participate in or win the Games, then they seek to undercut, defame and degrade the international competition in the minds of participants, spectators and global audiences,” the report said about Russia.
“These ongoing Russian influence operations have two central objectives: to denigrate the reputation of the International Olympic Committee on the world stage,” according to the report, “and to create the expectation of violence breaking out in Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympic Games.”
