China Uses AI-Generated Videos to Undermine U.S. Hegemony

Statistics from a recent Chinese propaganda operation are alarming. In what may be the most sophisticated disinformation and misinformation campaign China has ever conducted against the United States, Beijing partisans created a whopping 30 fake YouTube channels with 120 million views and 730,000 subscribers during 2023.

Consequently, in a December 2023 report titled “Shadow Play,” the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) posited that this effort could be “one of the most successful influence operations related to China ever witnessed on social media.”

More than 4,500 videos glorified China by extolling its technology and bragging that its expertise surpassed that of the United States. YouTube reels sang the virtues of Huawei and derided Apple. They also claimed America’s economy was in trouble and that China and Russia were the rightful leaders of the international order.

The voice-overs, created by commercially available “text-to-video” software, featured stilted grammar spoken in American accents. These voices and their personas were reportedly produced by artificial intelligence (AI), which allowed China to quickly and efficiently make the videos and deploy them on the web—creating a massive following before YouTube could react.

This content violated many of the video behemoth’s terms of service including transgressions for spam, deception, and misleading content. YouTube was apparently suspicious because it requires creators to disclose the use of AI and because the content appeared to be directed by the Chinese government.

The ASPI report noted that a partnership between public and private entities likely fueled the propaganda:

Our preliminary analysis is that the operator of this network could be a commercial actor operating under some degree of state direction, funding, or encouragement. This could suggest that some patriotic companies increasingly operate China-linked campaigns alongside government actors. 

Content uploaded to YouTube described numerous news stories generated by Chinese propaganda mills. For example, one video claimed that various governments in Southeast Asia planned to adopt the Chinese yuan as their “own currency.”

In early 2023, Google said it had “foiled more than 50,000 attempts” to spread misinformation via YouTube. Unfortunately, removing these videos is unlikely to stop China from producing them. Beijing obviously has the technology and desire to continue these influence operations given the great scale, low cost, and minimal human effort involved.

Still, YouTube should be lauded for moderating its content—not an easy feat when it comes to identifying sources of misinformation and disinformation among the thousands of user-created videos uploaded every minute.  

While it is unclear whether the U.S. government was aware of China’s campaign prior to the ASPI’s report, it should have been. Information operations are a standard form of warfare in which China excels. The country has shown that its propaganda is far-reaching and robust and that Beijing will be undeterred as it seeks to improve China’s geopolitical standing.

In this significant election year, the United States must be steadfast in rooting out Chinese misinformation and disinformation. AI is sure to create more machine-generated content that is difficult to counter. Fortunately, the Chinese have not mastered American dialect; the unnatural pauses and grammatical mistakes apparent in the content described above helped YouTube root out the questionable videos.

While Beijing has nothing to lose by creating more misleading content, the United States has much at stake. The decentralization and disjointedness of the American national security apparatus hinders our country from effectively responding to this type of video propaganda. The U.S. Department of Defense and Department of State, National Security Council staff, the intelligence community, and Congress all have a responsibility to curtail information operations from China.

It is reminiscent of the United States’ massive and expensive “whole-of-state” approach to cybersecurity, which has created national security problems by requiring numerous agencies and departments to develop a unified strategy for protection against cyberattacks. Government efforts to combat information operations face similar drawbacks.

China’s online propaganda campaign is far from over, and it is unclear whether America has the resources to defeat future efforts. Because off-the-shelf text-to-video applications are readily available to continue disseminating misinformation and disinformation indefinitely, we can expect more videos disparaging the United States to continue popping up throughout 2024.