VIEWPOINT
Many cyber threat intelligence and policy communities are increasingly concerned with the threat posed by generative artificial intelligence, as GenAI is being operationalized to attempt to influence attitudes and beliefs of target populations. But we also keep reading about how those documented methods have not influenced audiences or narratives much at all. Imagine an athlete who can perform at exceptional levels in running or other displays of strength. You hear he’s joining a rival cricket team. When you see him play, however, he can’t seem to hit anything. He doesn’t know how to play. For all his natural athletic ability, he doesn’t know how to hit or throw the correct way. Yes, he appears fearsome because of his general athletic performance, but he is not an effective player on that team, until he learns how to deliver and hit a cricket ball. This is one way to conceptualize how malign influence cyber actors are applying or thinking of applying scalable generative artificial intelligence to attempt to influence target audiences. This includes everyone, including pro-Western cyber actors targeting overseas audiences. A summer 2022 report highlighted how ineffective many of these ‘pro-Western’ narrative accounts appeared to be at generating engagement and building influence. While social media platforms have documented how these accounts created artful, foreign-language
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ISSUE 14
TheCyberExpress
content and calls to action to encourage engagement and social media response, most of these accounts had no more than a handful of likes or retweets on Twitter, and less than a quarter of the accounts had more than a thousand followers. Nearly half of these accounts posing as media organizations included batches of hashtags with their posted content, likely trying to reach broader audiences. But again, there was limited audience response. In my experience as a certified former profiler with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), broad appeals to broad audiences even in the right language on the right platform do not work. Content including narratives must be crafted specific to targeted individuals with some understanding of the kind of platforms they use and trust and the kind of relationships they have or how those relationships influence the decisions of that targeted individual or group. There are established theoretical frameworks for understanding generally how people, even outside of these behavioral relational contexts, process and respond to content like this. Communication researchers throughout the past forty years have established relatively similar conditions for cognitive and attitudinal processing of content. These dual processing models or conditions generally find that people spend more or less time thinking about and consuming or sharing content based on how relevant it is to them and how motivated they are to process that content.
