Scaling Laws The GoLaxy Revelations: China's AI-Driven Influence Operations, with Brett Goldstein, Brett Benson, and Renée DiResta
Oct 28, 2025
In a captivating discussion, Renée DiResta, an expert on misinformation, Brett Goldstein, a national security advisor, and Brett Benson, a political science professor, explore the dark side of AI in influence operations. They unveil the alarming GoLaxy documents detailing a 'Smart Propaganda System' capable of creating psychological profiles and resilient personas. The trio examines how AI has transformed disinformation tactics, making detection increasingly difficult, and warns of the growing threat to U.S. democracy and strategic alliances.
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AI Erases Old Detection Tells
- AI removes many old detection signals by generating fluent, persona-specific text that avoids prior 'slips' and plagiarism.
- This makes influence operations much harder to detect compared with human-run troll farms of the past.
Multimodal Personas Increase Realism
- Multimodal generation (text, images, audio, video) now enables creating immersive fake identities and novel deceptive moments.
- That combination raises long-term risk because personas can be believable across formats and sustained interactions.
Midnight LLM Translation Uncovered GoLaxy
- Brett Goldstein received a mysterious link to hundreds of Mandarin PDFs and analyzed them offline with a local LLM overnight.
- He found technical schematics, large OSINT collection and grids of people including U.S. congressmembers.