The American cyber security company Recorded Future in its recent report reported on a Russian campaign aimed at undermining European support for Ukraine. The so-called Operation Undermine made extensive use of AI-generated voices in fake "news" videos.
The American cyber security company Recorded Future in its recent report reported on a Russian campaign aimed at undermining European support for Ukraine. The so-called Operation Undermine made extensive use of AI-generated voices in fake "news" videos.
The videos aimed at a European audience included, among other things, attacks on Ukrainian politicians as corrupt or questioned the usefulness of military aid to Ukraine. For example, in one of the videos it was claimed that "even silencers cannot save the American Abrams tanks" to emphasize the senselessness of sending high-tech armored vehicles to Ukraine, writes TechCrunch.
The report said video creators "very likely" used voice-generating artificial intelligence, including ElevenLabs' technology, to make their content appear more legitimate. To test this, researchers at Recorded Future submitted the clips to ElevenLabs' proprietary AI Speech Classifier, which allows anyone to "determine whether an audio clip was created with ElevenLabs," and got a match.
While Recorded Future noted the alleged use of several commercial AI voice generation tools, it did not name any other than ElevenLabs.
the Russian organizers of the campaign released several videos with real human voices that had a "noticeable Russian accent". In contrast, the AI-generated voices spoke several European languages, including English, French, German and Polish, without foreign accents.
According to Recorded Future, the AI also made it possible to quickly publish misleading clips in several languages common in Europe, such as English, German, French, Polish, and Turkish (all languages supported by ElevenLabs, by the way).
Recorded Future attributes this activity to the "Social Design Agency," a Russian organization that was sanctioned by the U.S. government in March of this year for running "a network of more than 60 websites that posed as genuine news organizations in Europe and then used fake social media accounts to amplify deceptive content on fake websites.” All this was done "on behalf of the government of the Russian Federation," the US State Department said at the time.
The overall impact of the campaign on public opinion in Europe was minimal, Recorded Future concluded.
