Cheap Tricks, High-Impact: How AI Is Powering Sloppy Influence Campaigns

Cheap Tricks, High-Impact:

How AI Is Powering Sloppy Influence Campaigns

We thought AI would make influence operations smarter, more sophisticated, and convincing. Instead, it’s made them cheaper, lazier, and often… laughably bad. This talk highlights a growing class of low-effort, AI-powered influence campaigns that utilize broken grammar, synthetic personas, and templated content to gain visibility and traction across various platforms. We unpack how AI is reshaping the influence operation supply chain — lowering the barrier to entry, blurring the line between state and mercenary, and saturating our information ecosystem with sloppier but more scalable campaigns.