The GoLaxy papers: Inside China’s AI persona army therecord.media/golaxy-ch…

For years, Chinese information operations had been relatively clumsy. During the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, state-backed accounts on Twitter and Facebook pushed official slogans and clunky memes. They were easy to spot, often recycling stock photos and repeating identical lines. American officials dismissed them as amateurish compared to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which had seeded more sophisticated narratives during the 2016 election.

What the GoLaxy documents suggest is that Beijing has leapt from imitation to innovation — replacing mass-produced slogans with AI-tailored whispers, aimed at the weak spots of individual minds.

“These are fake but highly realistic AI-generated bots,” Benson explained. “It’s a made-up online profile that looks like a real person, interacts like a real person. Much more subtle than the Russian operations we saw in the 2016 election. They’re very, very tailored.”

For years, U.S. officials puzzled over China’s massive data heists — from the breach of the Office of Personnel Management in 2015 to the hack of Starwood hotels three years later. The explanation was always the same: Beijing was hoovering up all this data for a rainy day.

Benson believes the day has come.

“That was the big revelation to me … the data mining efforts paired with AI have the capacity to engage in a front of cognitive warfare that I didn’t really think about before,” he said. “I think this is the new frontier in national security.”