Generative AI (GenAI) could be used as a tool to increase engagement with online propaganda, a UK human rights group has warned.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to tackling extremism and disinformation, said that the technology has the potential to be exploited by extremists who could overwhelm platforms through coordinated online campaigns that produce similar or identical messages to flood social media platforms.

The organisation’s head of policy and research Milo Comerford told iNews that ISIS and other groups are recruiting online globally, explaining that AI tools are often better than Google Translate because they allow users to be more “idiomatic and adopt a more casual style”.

Comerford also warned that translating messages using AI instead of mainstream tools could help extremists evade detection, however he emphasised that the use of these tools is currently a “relatively limited phenomenon”.

The Community Security Trust, a charity aimed at protecting British Jews from antisemitism, also told the newspaper that last summer it had seen a significant increase in the amount of AI-created antisemitic imagery by extreme right-wing groups.

After the 7 October attacks, when Hamas killed around 1,200 Israeli citizens and took hundreds hostage, the organisation said that there had been a “huge surge” in the use of AI to generate antisemitic and pro-Hamas images by Islamist extremists.

“Imagery has always been really central to antisemitism, but what may have taken a committed propagandist a few hours or days can now be done in seconds,” Danny Morris from the Community Security Trust told iNews. “The implications of that are significant.

"It is almost virtually impossible to not come across AI-generated antisemitic imagery in some extremist spaces online.”

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