On December 14 2025, a terrorist attack occurred at Bondi Beach in Sydney Australia, leaving 15 civilians and one gunman dead. While Australia was still reeling in shock, social media saw the rapid spread of misinformation generated and powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI).<\/p>\n
For example, a manipulated video<\/a> of New South Wales Premier Chris Minns claimed one of the terrorists was an Indian national. X (formerly Twitter) was awash with celebrations of the hero defender \u201cEdward Crabtree\u201d<\/a>. And a deepfake photo of Arsen Ostrovsky, a noted human rights lawyer and survivor of Hamas\u2019 October 7 attack in Israel, depicted him as a crisis actor with makeup artists applying fake blood<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is an unfortunately common occurrence. From Bondi to Venezuela<\/a>, Gaza<\/a> and Ukraine<\/a>, AI has supercharged the spread of online misinformation. In fact, around half of the content you see online is now made and spread by AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n Generative AI can also create fake online profiles, or bots, which try to legitimise this misinformation through realistic-looking social media activity. <\/p>\n The goal is to deceive and confuse people \u2013 usually for political and financial reasons. But how effective are these bot networks? How hard is it to set them up? And crucially, can we mitigate their false content through cyber literacy?<\/p>\n To answer these questions, we set up Capture the Narrative<\/a> \u2013 the world\u2019s first social media wargame for students to build AI bots to influence a fictional election, deploying tactics that mirror manipulation of real social media.<\/p>\n Online confusion and the \u2018liar\u2019s dividend\u2019<\/p>\n Generative AI, used in services such as ChatGPT, can be prompted to quickly create realistic text and images. This is also how it can be used to generate highly persuasive fake content.<\/p>\n Once generated, realistic and relentless AI-driven bots create the illusion of consensus around the fake content by making hashtags or viewpoints trend.<\/p>\n Even if you know content is exaggerated or fake, it still has an impact on your perceptions<\/a>, beliefs<\/a> and mental health<\/a>.<\/p>\n Worse, as bots evolve, becoming indistinguishable from real users, we all start to lose confidence in what we see. This creates a \u201cliar\u2019s dividend<\/a>\u201d, where even real content is approached with doubt.<\/p>\n Authentic but critical voices can be dismissed as bots, shills, and fakes, making it harder to have real debates on difficult topics.<\/p>\n How hard is it to capture a narrative?<\/p>\n