AI propaganda factories represent a fundamental shift from traditional tools of influence campaigns to automated, scalable operations that can sustain consistent personas across platforms and time, work round-the-clock, and be fully autonomous. Locally-run AI systems now enable actors from nation-states to individual operators with consumer hardware to deploy coherent politically or ideologically aligned personas that adapt to conversational contexts.

In his talk, Dr Olejnik will examine how these systems exploit the attack surface of modern societies: technological infrastructure, institutional vulnerabilities, and human psychology. Drawing from empirical research measuring the performance of such systems, he'll demonstrate that the capability for fully automated influence operations has already arrived, shifting the threat landscape from resource-intensive campaigns to commodity hardware deployments. Western open societies face challenging asymmetric scenarios where many actors can attack while defensive capabilities remain unequal. This opens urgent questions about detection frameworks, crisis coordination mechanisms, and technical, policy and governance approaches that can scale to match the emerging threat landscape.

Dr Lukasz Olejnik is an independent researcher and consultant and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, KCL. He was formerly cyberwarfare advisor at the International Committee of the Red Cross and a member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group. He is the author of Philosophy of Cybersecurity (CRC Press, 2023) and Propaganda: From Disinformation and Influence to Operations and Information Warfare (CRC Press, 2024).