Pro-China YouTube Network Used AI to Defame US, Report Finds

In a somewhat pompous tone and with somewhat awkward grammar, the American-accented voice took to YouTube last month to ridicule Washington’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas, claiming that the United States was unable to “play its role as a mediator like China.” play” and “is now in a position of significant isolation.”

The 10-minute post was one of more than 4,500 videos in an unusually large network of YouTube channels spreading pro-China and anti-American narratives, according to a report this week from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a security-focused think tank .

Some videos used artificially generated avatars or voiceovers, making the campaign the first influence operation the institute was aware of to pair AI voices with video essays.

The aim of the campaign, according to the report, was clear: to influence global opinion in favor of China and against the United States. The videos promoted the narrative that Chinese technology was superior to America’s, that the United States was doomed to economic collapse, and that China and Russia were responsible geopolitical players. Some clips focused on Chinese companies such as Huawei and denigrated American companies such as Apple.

Content from at least 30 channels in the network attracted nearly 120 million views and 730,000 subscribers since last year, along with occasional advertisements from Western companies, the report found.

Some videos contained titles and scripts that appeared to be direct translations of common Chinese phrases and the names of Chinese companies, the report said. Others cited information that could be traced to news stories produced and distributed primarily in mainland China.

Disinformation – such as the false claim that some Southeast Asian countries had adopted the Chinese yuan as their own currency – was common. The videos were often able to respond quickly to current events. Jacinta Keast, an analyst at the Australian institute, wrote that the coordinated campaign “could be one of the most successful China-related influence operations ever on social media.”

YouTube said in a statement that its teams are working around the clock to protect the community, adding that “we have invested heavily in robust systems to proactively detect coordinated influence operations.” The company said it welcomed investigative efforts and that it had closed several of the channels mentioned in the report for violating the platform’s policies.

Efforts to promote pro-China messaging have increased in recent years, but have largely included low-quality content that attracted limited engagement or failed to maintain a meaningful audience, Ms. Keast said.

“This campaign actually uses artificial intelligence, giving it the ability to create compelling threat content at scale at a very limited cost compared to previous campaigns we’ve seen,” she said.

Several other recent reports have suggested that China has become more aggressive in pushing propaganda that denigrates the United States. Historically, its influence operations have focused on defending the Community Party government and its policies on issues such as the persecution of Uyghurs or the fate of Taiwan.

China began targeting the United States more directly amid the massive pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and continued into the Covid-19 pandemic, echoing longstanding Russian efforts to undermine American leadership and influence at home and on board to discredit.

Over the summer, researchers from Microsoft and other companies found evidence of inauthentic stories that China used to falsely accuse the United States of using energy weapons to fuel the deadly wildfires in Hawaii in August.

In a report in September, the State Department accused China of using “deceptive and coercive methods” to shape the global information environment, including creating fake social media accounts and even fake news organizations. Other research suggests that China has been actively spreading disinformation in Taiwan that the United States will eventually betray the island nation.

Meta announced last month that it had removed 4,789 Facebook accounts from China that pretended to be Americans to discuss political issues, warning that the campaign appeared to be laying the groundwork for meddling in the 2024 presidential election. It was the fifth network with ties with China that Meta had discovered this year, the most of any other country.

The advent of artificial technology appears to have attracted particular interest from Beijing. Ms Keast of the Australian institute said disinformation purveyors are increasingly using easily accessible video editing and AI programs to create large amounts of persuasive content.

She said the network of pro-China YouTube channels most likely fed English-language scripts into readily available online text-to-video software or other programs that require no technical expertise and can produce clips in minutes. Such programs often allow users to select AI-generated narration and adjust the gender, accent and tone of voice.

Some of the voices used in the pro-China network were clearly synthetic. Ms. Keast noted that the audio lacked natural pauses and contained pronunciation errors and occasional notes of electronic interference. Occasionally, multiple channels in the network would use the same voice. (One group of videos, however, tried to trick viewers into thinking a real person was speaking, using audio such as “I’m your host, Steffan.”)

In 39 of the videos, Ms Keast found at least 10 artificially generated avatars advertised by a British AI company. She wrote that she also discovered what could potentially be the first example of an influence operation from a digital avatar created by a Chinese company: a woman in a red dress named Yanni.

The size of the pro-China network is probably even larger, according to the report. Similar channels appeared to target Indonesians and French. Three separate channels posted videos about chip production with similar thumbnail images and the same title translated into English, French and Spanish.