Israel funded $46.5M campaign to shape AI responses on Gaza war: report

Israel reportedly funded a $46.5 million digital influence campaign to shape AI responses regarding the Gaza war, according to a report by Drop Site News. The campaign, allegedly managed by Brad Parscale's firm Clock Tower X, involved creating a network of websites like Allyvia.org and FactSignal.org to publish pro-Israel narratives. These sites aimed to influence large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity by having their content indexed by search engines and incorporated into AI training datasets, a practice referred to as "LLM poisoning."

"Common Crawl is widely used in the world of data science for training LLMs, which also means that actors want to manipulate the answers in their favour,"

said Herve Letoqueux, CEO of Check First. Some AI systems have already cited these websites in their responses, and content from the network has entered AI training datasets through Common Crawl, a widely used web archive.