AI-Generated Women Promote Poland's EU Exit in Disinformation Campaign

18 hours ago7 min read

The digital specters haunting Poland’s political discourse are beautiful, eloquent, and utterly fabricated. A recent, now-deleted TikTok campaign, operating under the handle ‘Prawilne_Polki’ (‘Righteous Polish Women’), deployed a battalion of AI-generated female personas to advocate for a ‘Polexit’—a Polish exit from the European Union—while preaching hardline, nationalist views.This isn't merely a crude deepfake of a politician saying something inflammatory; it’s a more insidious, next-generation disinformation playbook that leverages synthetic intimacy and algorithmic persuasion to target a generation reared on short-form video. The campaign’s swift deletion by platform moderators is a tactical victory, but it represents a mere skirmish in a protracted, asymmetric information war where the very tools designed to augment human creativity are being weaponized to undermine democratic cohesion.The persistence of such propaganda in Poland, a nation already grappling with deep political polarization and a government that has frequently clashed with Brussels over rule-of-law issues, underscores a critical inflection point in AI ethics and policy. We are moving beyond bots and troll farms into an era of scalable, hyper-personalized synthetic influencers, engineered not just to spread falsehoods but to embody an entire ideological aesthetic—attractive, relatable, and persuasive—that bypasses traditional critical filters.The ‘Prawilne_Polki’ avatars, with their flawless features and polished rhetoric, are direct descendants of Isaac Asimov’s fictional robots, entities designed for a specific function, yet their function here is societal manipulation, not service. This campaign did not emerge in a vacuum; it exploits existing societal fissures within Poland, where Euroscepticism, while not a majority position, is a potent political force championed by parts of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party apparatus and its media allies.The strategic genius, albeit malign, lies in its targeting: TikTok’s young, visually-driven user base is presented with ideologically charged content wrapped in a package that feels native to their digital environment. It’s propaganda as entertainment, disinformation as influencer marketing.Experts in computational propaganda warn that this is merely a beta test. The underlying large language and image generation models are becoming cheaper, more accessible, and more convincing by the month.Soon, generating a persistent, interactive synthetic persona that can debate in real-time, customize its message to individual viewers, and evade detection by current content moderation systems will be trivial. The consequences are profound, extending far beyond Poland’s borders.

#AI-generated propaganda

#deepfakes

#disinformation

#Poland

#Polexit

#political manipulation

#social media

#TikTok

#featured