“United Russia” announced that in this year’s regional election campaigns it will use ChatGpt for its propaganda as well as other Russian-made systems. Objective: the “suppression of threats” to prevent adversaries “from building alternative future scenarios to ours.”
Moscow () – Deputies from Putin’s “United Russia” party have declared their intention to use data from the artificial neural network (ANN) in this year’s regional election campaigns, mathematical models of artificial intelligence to simulate voter orientations. The undersecretary of the party, Sergej Perminov, explained that in this way they intend to avoid the risks of “demonization” and “satirization”, which in the ideological language of Putin’s edinorrossy means the fight against external interference.
Unified gubernatorial elections will be held in 21 federal subjects on September 10, including early elections for the single-member State Duma seat in the Simferopol constituency of Crimea and other fragments of the electoral composition. According to Perminov, whoever does not start using artificial intelligence is doomed to defeat.
Therefore, all the already accessible tools of the ANN will be applied, both in the field of forecasts and analysis and for “creative suggestions, for example, for technological attack, with which these systems align in a few seconds”, and also to generate video material and images for propaganda of various kinds.
The use of ANN resources will also allow attracting new sympathizers, presenting the party’s plans in the best way for each category or group of voters. They will be “viral campaigns”, which will make use of paradox and dramaturgy: “we are doing preventive analyzes to maximize the forms of expression”, confirms Perminov. Foreign neural technologies such as ChatGpt or Midjourney will be used, but also Russian production systems such as Kandinsky’s “Sber”.
United Russia has already signed agreements with various companies for this project, and this political season will be “experimental” in view of next year’s “great presidential campaign” for Putin’s umpteenth re-election, which will have to be presented as an apocalyptic triumph. . The contents will have forms of “additional humanization”, with games of double meaning and humor, direct experiences, animated dialogues and new ideas. For the party it will be a “gamble”, in which the human intellect must not succumb to the anonymity of the machines.
In addition to the advantages it offers, the initiative aims to prevent the risks involved in the use of ANN. Perminov’s presentation lists at least a dozen of these risks, starting with the “daily advance of the diffusion of artificial intelligence”, including precisely in communication with voters at the national and global levels. Instead, the risks of “demonization” and “satirization” are more related to the avalanche of mud that is poured on the party and the regime, to try to discredit it.
The “suppression of threats” must, therefore, prevent adversaries from “building alternative future scenarios to ours” using more advanced technologies, based on the public’s requirements for ever faster information with guarantees of “authenticity and confirmation “, to the point of spreading a “hallucination of reality”. The example of ChatGpt is very indicative as a mechanism to prepare documents, build models of voter reactions and systematize the most complex materials.
According to the political scientist Mikhail Vinogradov, “neural networks are reliable as second degree partners, they are not gurus or robots”, and what is sought is a test of the possibilities of artificial intelligence, rather than its use on a massive scale, which carries as many risks as banning it. The director of the company “Promobot”, Oleg Kivokurtsev, stated that a clever use of these technologies will allow politicians to send their audience “increasingly personalized messages”, with an increasingly detailed analysis of people’s needs, and will allow you to become a true “big brother” for them.
