Israel Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It's Working
a day ago
- Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is overseeing a $46.5 million contract with Israel to create websites that post pro-Israel content, aiming to influence AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
- Parscale's firm, Clock Tower X, runs at least 10 websites (e.g., Allyvia.org, FactSignal.org) that promote Israeli narratives on Gaza, journalists, and military actions, with required FARA disclaimers.
- These websites are being crawled by Common Crawl, a key source for training AI models, with 912 crawls across 10 sites between January and June, successfully infiltrating training data.
- Chatbots like Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot have cited these sites in responses without flagging them as Israeli propaganda, while Claude and ChatGPT sometimes include disclaimers.
- Disinformation experts note that the nuanced, sourced, and structured content on these sites makes them more likely to be picked up by AI, as LLMs favor balanced, factual tones.
- The operation has expanded from $1.5 million to $4.5 million per month, but Israeli officials express dissatisfaction with results, calling it counterproductive.