Ben Nimmo

When Ben Nimmo first began tracking online influence operations targeting elections in 2014, he had to scroll for hours on Twitter, studying how networks of fake accounts tried to hijack partisan narratives.

A decade later, AI is changing the game—not just for foreign threat actors, but for those working to counter them. “So much of the conversation is around how the bad guys might use AI,” says Nimmo, who now works as the principal threat intelligence investigator at OpenAI (a TIME licensing and technology partner). “My all-time favorite misquote from Harry Potter is: We can use magic too.”

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Nimmo leads a team that seeks to identify foreign and domestic bad actors who use ChatGPT and other OpenAI tools to carry out covert influence operations. But he says OpenAI’s own tools also give his team unprecedented visibility into large or suspicious patterns of activity. “You feed it to the model, and it comes back with an answer in a couple of minutes,” he says. “The speed with which we can investigate and analyze this stuff is orders of magnitude faster.”

In May, OpenAI announced it had removed five covert influence operations, detected by Nimmo’s team, based in Russia, China, Iran, and Israel. All were trying to use the company’s AI tools to manipulate public opinion.

A big lesson from 2016, when Russia mounted a vast operation to meddle in the U.S. presidential election, was that influence operations were “a bit like mold in the bathroom,” says Nimmo. “They thrive in the dark, and they thrive when nobody is looking to wipe them up.” Now, bad actors seeking to influence elections may be using different tactics, he says. “Operators seem like they’re deliberately trying to get caught, in order to sow fear about the potential of thousands or millions of others like them stoking chaos,” he says, even though most of these operations gain barely any traction on their own. The goal, experts say, is to make people distrust all information.

“Take a deep breath and stay alert, but above all, stay calm,” advises Nimmo. “Yes, it’s gonna be a busy year. Just keep focusing on the evidence and asking the question, did it actually go anywhere?”