The American cybersecurity company Recorded Future reported in a recent report about a Russian campaign aimed at undermining European support for Ukraine. In the so-called "Undermining" operation, AI-generated voices were widely used in fake "news" videos. The videos, targeted at European audiences, included attacks on Ukrainian politicians as corrupt or questioned the usefulness of military aid to Ukraine. For example, one video claimed that "even jammers can't save American Abrams tanks," highlighting the absurdity of sending high-tech armored vehicles to Ukraine, according to TechCrunch.
The report states that the creators of the videos "very likely" used AI-generated voices, including the ElevenLabs technology, to give their content a more legitimate appearance. To verify this, Recorded Future researchers submitted the clips to their own AI Speech Classifier ElevenLabs, which allows anyone to "determine if an audio clip was created using ElevenLabs," and they found a match.
While Recorded Future noted the probable use of several commercial AI voice generation tools, it did not identify any others besides ElevenLabs.
Russian organizers of the campaign released several videos with real human voices that had a "distinct Russian accent." In contrast, the AI-generated voices spoke several European languages, including English, French, German, and Polish, without any foreign accents.
According to Recorded Future, AI also allowed the rapid release of misleading clips in multiple European languages, such as English, German, French, Polish, and Turkish (by the way, all of these languages are supported by ElevenLabs).
Recorded Future attributes this activity to the "Social Design Agency" — a Russian organization that the U.S. government sanctioned in March this year for managing "a network of over 60 websites that posed as legitimate news organizations in Europe and then used fake social media accounts to amplify the misleading content of the counterfeit websites." All of this was done "on behalf of the Russian government," the U.S. State Department stated at the time.
The overall impact of the campaign on public opinion in Europe was minimal, Recorded Future concluded.
