Pro-Iran groups deploy AI to troll Trump, influence the war narrative

Pro-Iran groups have used artificial intelligence to create slick internet memes in English to try to shape the narrative during the war against the U.S. and Israel and foster opposition to it. Analysts say the memes appear to be coming from groups linked to the government in Tehran. “This is a propaganda war for them,” Neil Lavie-Driver, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, said, referring to Iran. “Their goal is to sow enough discontent with the conflict as to eventually force the West to cave in, so it is massively important to them.” The memes are fluent not just in English but in American culture and trolling, racking up millions of views — though it's not clear how much influence they have had. “They're using popular culture against the No. 1 pop culture country, the United States,” said Nancy Snow, a scholar who has written more than a dozen books on propaganda. The pro-Iran images circulating online include a series that uses the style of the “Lego” animated movies. In one, an Iranian military commander raps, “You thought you ran the globe, sitting on your throne. Now we turning every base into a bed of stone,” as Trump falls into a bullseye built of “Epstein files.” The animations show levels of sophistication and internet access that indicate ties to government offices, said Mahsa Alimardani, a director of WITNESS, a human-rights group: “If you're able to have the bandwidth needed to generate content like that and upload it, you are officially or unofficially cooperating with the regime.” State media has reposted some of the memes, including some from the account behind the “Lego”-style videos, Akhbar Enfejari, which means Explosive News. Akhbar Enfejari described itself as an independent group of Iranians with no connection to the government. “We don't even receive any funding. We're just a group of friends working voluntarily — paying for our own internet, using our own laptops and computers, and doing all of this ourselves,” the group told The Associated Press on the messaging app Telegram. “They've long dominated the media landscape and, through that power, imposed narratives on many nations,” Akhbar Enfejari said. “But this time, something feels different. This time, we've disrupted the game. This time, we're doing it better.”