LLM grooming

The deliberate mass publication of web content aimed less at human readers than at the crawlersweb crawler, n.: A program that automatically travels the web, following links from page to page and downloading what it finds — used by search engines, archives and AI companies to gather data., search indexes and retrieval systems that feed language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code., so that models absorb and repeat the publisher's narratives. It works at the scale of the open web rather than a particular dataset, and can act through pretraining datapretraining data, n.: The enormous body of text, code and other material — mostly from the web — that a large AI model first learns from, before it is tuned to follow instructions or chat. or at answer time, when a chatbot searches the web and cites whatever it finds (retrieval-augmented generationretrieval-augmented generation, n.: Giving an AI an open-book exam: before answering, it looks up relevant passages in a set of documents and bases its reply on them, often citing where each point came from.). The best-documented case is the pro-Kremlin 'Pravda' network (also tracked as Portal Kombat), whose sites republish at least 3.6 million articles a year, largely machine-translated, with little human readership. Countermeasures include source-reputation filtering, provenance signals and auditing chatbot answers against catalogs of known false claims.

Several of the chatbot's citations were Pravda mirror sites, a textbook sign of LLM grooming.