2 min read

How agentic AI can strengthen information operations

How agentic AI can strengthen information operations
Photo by ROBIN WORRALL / Unsplash

Information operations can be traced back as far as ancient Rome—though on some level itʼs undoubtedly been with us since the dawn of intelligent human life. Think of info ops as the deliberate deployment of propaganda campaigns, dis/misinformation, and other types of messaging to influence, corrupt, and/or disrupt target environments. 

Naturally there is discussion of how info ops looks in the age of artificial intelligence; often times the focus is on two things:

  1. how the United States and its allies can use AI to play defense against their rivals; and
  2. how the U.S. et al. can use AI to generate tailored content should they decide to go on offense.

Both are appropriate uses of AI, at least when deployed within strict ethical guardrails (especially important for #2). But only focusing on these two use cases risks underutilizing some of the most valuable capabilities presented by today’s AI-powered agents.

In a new piece for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, FilterLabs COO Erol Yayboke offers ideas for how agentic AI can be used not just for tailored content generation, but for the other two “T”s of info ops as well: targeting and timing. 

On Targeting: “AI agents can be trained to use the most appropriate language model and relevant search engine(s). They can also figure out precise locations of sources and can regularly evaluate and update source lists. They can work as a team, evaluate one another’s work, suggest high-quality sources to human users in a matter of seconds, and be programmed to regularly revisit their work in living, breathing online spaces. The result is a quickly painted, dynamic, transparent, and human-verified portrait of the internet as it exists in the target environment.”

On Timing: “The ability to know to whom content should be targeted should be coupled with knowing when to deploy the content. Here, AI agents can be deployed to scrape content from the sources they found and that humans have validated. Other agents can be used to verify, sort, and filter curated artifacts. Still others can analyze and understand the content, presenting distilled toplines to busy operators and commanders, flagging anomalies or shifts, and even suggesting options for time and place of message deployment. And yes, they can even be trained to generate appropriate content for the appropriate audience to receive at the appropriate time.”

Read the entire piece here. Come for thoughts on better utilization of agentic AI; stay for references to Augustus Caesar and some good olʼ football coach truisms.

In not entirely unrelated news, exciting things are afoot at FilterLabs. Stay tuned to this newsletter for more information when it becomes public or let us know if you’d like a preview of our new agentic data discovery, streaming, and analysis tool, Ubiquity.