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Researcher warns against the influence of malicious AI swarms
Lack of transparency in tech platforms has become a threat, according to a researcher.
Exactly six years ago, in June 2020, a peculiar piece of news emerged from the small town of Huancavelica in Peru.
Eight technicians who had been sent to the town to carry out maintenance on a telecommunications antenna had been kidnapped by a group of villagers.
Local media reported that the villagers who were holding the technicians captive would only release them if they agreed to remove all the telecommunications antennas from the village.
They had hinted that 5G antennas were contributing to the spread of Covid-19.
Digital wildfires – when disinformation spreads rapidly
The pandemic had been raging for over six months and had killed hundreds of thousands of people.
On social media, the theory that there was a connection between 5G technology and the spread of viruses had spread like wildfire. A digital wildfire, as researcher Daniel Thilo Schroeder at SINTEF Digital calls it.
“A digital wildfire occurs when disinformation spreads quickly through social networks and ends in real-world consequences,” he explains.
He studies how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to influence people through social media.
Democratic resilience
Schroeder is concerned with democratic resilience and societal security. He has conducted extensive research into the 5G theory and how it spread.
The researchers reviewed Twitter activity before, during, and after the peak of the conspiracy in spring 2020.
They looked at how users communicated and how groups, so-called communities, grew and interacted over time.
They saw how prominent conspiracy theorists helped to amplify the claims.
It all ended with people setting fire to telecommunications antennas and kidnapping telecommunications technicians.
“Conspiracy theories like this grow from sporadic tweets to a global spread, with a dramatic upscaling of disinformation,” says Schroeder.
Tech giants shut out researchers
Back in 2020, large language models that we often refer to as AI, were still in their infancy. Now, six years later, artificial intelligence has become cheap and widely accessible.
In combination with social networks, AI can cause digital wildfires of a completely different nature.
At the same time, it has become difficult for researchers to keep up with what is happening. The major platforms no longer give researchers access to their data.
“All the APIs from the major media platforms have been closed. We no longer have the ability to analyse the content and see what is going on out there,” Schroeder says.
Agentic artificial intelligence is AI that does not merely respond to what you ask it, but can carry out tasks more or less independently.
Such AI could give information campaigns and the spread of disinformation superpowers, according to the researcher.
“The large language models, such as ChatGPT, are known for being able to express themselves very persuasively. They aren’t good at reasoning, but they are extremely good at language. They manage to resonate with the way people think,” says Schroeder.
Swarms of AI agents threaten us
Researchers are warning against what they call swarms of cooperative, malicious AI agents, unleashed by political leaders who want to influence public opinion and change people’s picture of reality and their political perceptions.
“With agentic AI, it’s no longer just a matter of language models being good at convincing you and getting you to change your mind about a topic. Now AI can also coordinate the campaign itself,” says Schroeder.
In practice, this means setting a large number – thousands – of coordinated AI agents in motion to infiltrate online communities and create consensus.
The AI agents pretend to be real people, posting messages in which they use slang and phrasing that make them appear real.
The AI agents can coordinate with each other, change strategy along the way, and stay active for a long time. They can write blogs and send emails, choosing which channels to use depending on what serves them best.
“It’s just frightening how easy these things are to vibe code and just have small bot armies that can actually navigate online social media platforms and email and use these tools,” Schroeder said in an interview with The Guardian earlier this year.
“We need to regain access to data"
Schroeder believes it's important to monitor the prevalence of such AI swarms, and supports the idea of an AI observatory that could investigate how artificial intelligence affects society.
“We need to regain access to data so that it becomes possible to actually study it. Researchers and decision-makers must be given the opportunity to exchange data and results, so that new mechanisms can be developed to capture the phenomenon,” he says.
He believes it is not enough to just monitor content on the platforms.
Content-based detection is no longer sufficient now that large language models can pass the Turing test and similar tests, the researcher believes.
The Turing test is a test proposed by Alan Turing in which a machine’s intelligence is assessed based on whether it can carry on a conversation in such a way that a human cannot distinguish it from another human.
Malicious campaigns can now be scaled up
"Instead, we believe that we need to examine the behavioural patterns of such swarms, such as how they coordinate their activities,” says Schroeder.
He compares the situation to the Russian Twitter operation in 2016, where Russian troll factories were used to influence the US presidential election.
The campaign did not have much impact. It did not reach many people and had no visible impact on the election result.
“At that time, it was about using scripts – small computer programs – that tweeted the same message over and over again. They were easy to detect. And they had to use real people to do the work. They reached very few people. We think this has changed. Because now you can scale up,” says Schroeder.
References:
Gåsvær et al. The 5G COVID-19 Digital Wildfire: An evolving network of Twitter contacts to explore phase transition metaphors in viral misinformation, PLOS One, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0343661
Schroeder et al. How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy. The fusion of agentic AI and LLMs marks a new frontier in information warfare (Abstract), Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adz1697
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Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning.no
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