Diplomacy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Earlier this year, I had the great honor of being chosen as one of fourteen Emerging Scholars to participate in the 2024 Milton Wolf Seminar on Media & Diplomacy. Although the seminar was a whirlwind two-day event hosted at the Diplomatische Akademie Wien–the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, Austria for the non-German speakers–the duration of the event was filled with interesting and engaging discussions centered around the theme for this year: Bots, Bombs, and Bilateralism: Evolutions in Media and Diplomacy.

Diplomats, journalists, former tech executives, human rights advocates, professors representing a multitude of disciplines, and choice others comprised the cohort of panelists, organizers, and emerging scholars. Throughout our two-day seminar, I was surprised by how disproportionately the thematic topics of Bombs and Bilateralism were truly brought to the forefront of our discussions, which tended to heavily favor the Bots, and primarily the topics of disinformation and artificial intelligence.

The focus on AI was not at all surprising. It is the shiny new technology and tool that many governments, people, and organizations around the world are still trying to divine its influence on society moving forward. For some of those present, the AI crystal ball shows only dystopian futures akin to Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World and others see a world where AI empowers miraculous medical breakthroughs or creates personally curated curricula to optimize the learning experience of children.

From the Radio to X: Evolutions in the Firehouse of Falsehoods

Society has witnessed the effects of disinformation and propaganda on media and political landscapes for over 100 years. The likes of Edward Bernays (Bahn, 2023) and Joseph Goebbels (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC) sit at the forefront of the earlier periods of modern public relations and propaganda at a time when the quickest method to disseminate information was the radio. By utilizing psychological practices and understandings, both men were able to shift the mindset of their respective consumers toward their desired perspectives, for better or for the worst.

Over the last 30+ years, the internet has exponentially accelerated the dissemination of disinformation and propaganda, turning some online information spheres–and most certainly comment sections–into zones of autonomy where the realities of a post-truth society have come to roost in some form or fashion. Every lurch forward in information technology has heralded the end times for diplomacy, but how will Artificial Intelligence and diplomacy converge?

The firehose of falsehoods model of propaganda (Paul & Matthews, 2016) uses high-volume and multichannel methods to flood the information sphere through rapid, continuous, and repetitive content that lacks commitment to objective reality or consistency. These waves of disinformation are not tailor-made to convince audiences of any one reality, but instead aim to undergird the traditional media landscape and erode trust and support in objective journalism and democratic institutions. The differences between fact and opinion now seem to be lost on some portions of society.

Tools like the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund’s Information Laundromat (ASD Team, 2024) demonstrate how Russia Today (RT) is woven into the digital information environment (Benzoni, Koronska, Reyes, Rogers, & Schafer, 2024). Even though the Russian state-controlled international news television network funded by the Russian government is widely blocked throughout EU search results, RT articles bypass these blocks when they are republished to third-party websites that often publish these articles verbatim or in a near-identical fashion. According to ASD’s reporting (Schafer, Benzoni, Koronska, Rogers, & Reyes, 2024), some of these third-party websites claim to be local news outlets, spirituality or men’s health blogs, or even websites operated by Hezbollah. The Information Laundromat tool uses an algorithmic approach to grade the similarity of articles to determine if they are copies of the original RT work.

However, artificial intelligence and large-language models have the potential to undermine the entire system that this particular tool, or any using similar filtering schema, uses and make other methods of tracking article origination even more difficult. Large-language models (LLMs) embedded in the information laundering process will allow users or bots to rewrite articles using AI so that the same underlying disinformation is present, but with deft enough editing to fool some of the disinformation tracking tools. We’ve seen some of this in real-time with the story of a particular account on X that started posting messages stating the accounts credits had run out and the initial prompt it was fed. Savvy social mediaites temporarily hijacked the bot and even got it to write a poem about US presidents. However, future systems will be more robust and less likely to fall for the reverse prompt feeding that truly demonstrates that the account was an AI bot.

The convergence of social media and artificial intelligence has created the perfect storm for disinformation. Malicious actors can now use AI to create deepfakes and other persuasive content that can be used to sow discord and undermine trust in institutions. These capabilities will only continue to adapt and become more powerful. This raises serious questions about the future of diplomacy in a world where truth is increasingly subjective. How can diplomats negotiate with countries that are using AI to manipulate their people or the people of another nation? How can we build trust and cooperation in a world where information is weaponized? These are just some of the challenges that AI poses to the traditional art of diplomacy.

Challenges and Considerations for Diplomacy

The traditional practice of diplomacy has been constantly evolving as information technologies, like social media, have given access to and expanded diplomatic engagement to new parts of society, government, and publics. Now, corporations are more involved in international affairs, city diplomacy has linked metropolitan areas across the globe, and individual social media personalities can influence massive worldwide audiences. As the aperture of diplomacy expands to include new players in the picture, diplomats must contend with this new landscape. Artificial intelligence will both hinder and aid diplomats in rising to this new challenge.

Inevitably, AI will continue to gain traction in the information space and increasingly be used by anti-democratic groups and authoritarian regimes to create Astro-turf messaging campaigns to either inflate their support, or dismiss, distort, distract, or dismay targeted audiences. Diplomats and entire national diplomatic systems will have to adapt to new circumstances to counter the ease with which disinformation can be spread. However, this is where the traditional wheelhouse of diplomacy is strongest. These developments will continue to inflate personal connections as the strongest combatant against disinformation, and since the real-world ecosystem is the costliest operational setting for those who utilize disinformation, real-world connections will be ever more critical.

In this reinvigorated shift toward personal relationships, AI has the greatest potential benefit to diplomats around the globe. If AI can be effectively harnessed to reign in some of the bureaucratic noise that pervades the day-to-day tasks of diplomats, then AI can free up more time for diplomats to do exactly what they are meant to do: build and maintain relationships.

The concept of Guerrilla Diplomats seems even more relevant in this paradigm shift as traditional diplomats would no longer be tied to their desks at the embassy or consulate, pushing through their administrative duties, but could be more mobile to travel throughout their respective districts and provide the much-needed face time required to build and maintain long-lasting diplomatic partnerships.

However, the extreme of the guerilla diplomacy spectrum should be avoided. Diplomatic posts abroad are incredibly resource-intensive establishments. Unshackling diplomats from their desks may seem like a path toward rounding budgetary corners, but pulling thousands of diplomats back to their capital cities, scaling down their overall presence overseas, and abandoning long-term diplomatic posts across the globe in an attempt to save resources will lead to stunted diplomatic relations devoid of the trust necessary to protect national security, promote national interests, and build bilateral cooperation and understanding.

Artificial Intelligence: Death Knell of Diplomacy?

Technologies have always come with trade-offs to their adoptions, and this is no different when pondering the effects of AI on diplomacy. Every new wave of technology seemingly spelled the end to “traditional diplomacy”: the telegraph would be the death of diplomacy because you no longer had to be physically present with someone to have a conversation; the television was the end of diplomacy because you could get your message directly in front certain target audiences. The internet was the death knell of diplomacy because governments could shutter their foreign diplomatic posts and run the same operations from a centralized location back in the capital city. All of these new waves of technology were to bring about the end of diplomacy, but it remains today.

Diplomats are resilient and understand that the human connection brings diplomacy to the fore and keeps it as a relevant tradecraft for negotiating and implementing foreign policy. Each wave of technology only serves to make this role “easier” by hastening the rate of communication and connecting different groups at a rate our pre-telegraph diplomats could not have imagined.

Diplomacy has a lot of work cut out for itself in the coming years as AI continues to gain traction. With time, I know diplomats and diplomacy will embrace this technological shift, adapt these new tools to fit their purposes, and sharpen the necessary skills to continue building and maintaining person-to-person relationships, because in the end, regardless of the tools utilized, it is the people who are at the heart of diplomacy.

References

Bahn, R. (2023, November 2). Remembering Edward Bernays: The Father of Modern Advertising. Retrieved from Medium: https://medium.com/@rexbahn690/remembering-edward-bernays-the-father-of-modern-advertising-e1afdc2dfea6

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. (Accessed on May 12, 2024). Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. Retrieved from Holocaust Encyclopedia: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ministry-of-propaganda-and-public-enlightenment

Paul, C., & Matthews, M. (2016, July 11). The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It. Retrieved from RAND: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

ASD Team. (2024, May 30). Faux Local News Sites, Lifestyle and Spirituality Blogs, and a Designated Terrorist Entity Among Nearly 400 Websites Laundering Russian Propaganda Online. Retrieved from Alliance for Securing Democracy at the GMF: https://informationlaundromat.com/

Benzoni, P., Koronska, K., Reyes, K., Rogers, R., & Schafer, B. (2024, May 30). The Russian Propaganda Nesting Doll: How RT is Layered into the Digital Information Environment. Retrieved from Alliance for Securing Democracy at the GMF: https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/the-russian-propaganda-nesting-doll-how-rt-is-layered-into-the-digital-information-environment/

Schafer, B., Benzoni, P., Koronska, K., Rogers, R., & Reyes, K. (2024, May 30). The Russian Propaganda Nesting Doll: How RT is Layered into the Digital Information Environment. Retrieved from Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund: https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/the-russian-propaganda-nesting-doll-how-rt-is-layered-into-the-digital-information-environment/