REEEC New Directions Lecture: Halyna Padalko, "AI for Disinformation: Threat or Remedy?”

AI-scaled information operations are becoming a business: automation makes influence cheaper to produce, easier to distribute, and harder to trace, while increasing precision and plausibility. Online platforms can be “captured” through industrialized content generation and LLM grooming, building propaganda ecosystems designed to be scraped by chatbots so manipulative narratives reappear inside generative AI answers, turning AI itself into a contested battlefield.

The same technologies can be optimized for political persuasion at scale, eroding cognitive autonomy and weakening democratic will. Yet AI can also be part of the defence through real-time detection of coordinated campaigns, early-warning models that identify content likely to go viral, and provenance/authentication methods such as watermarking and signed metadata (e.g., C2PA).

The lecture also tries to address this problem with tree level of solution sets: short-term (technical interventions), medium-term (policy and platform governance), and long-term (education that builds strategic cognitive resilience).

Dr. Halyna Padalko is a multidisciplinary researcher specializing in strategic communication, propaganda, disinformation, and AI-enabled information manipulation, with a focus on policy. She holds an MA in Global Governance from the University of Waterloo and a PhD in Computer Science from the National Aerospace University, Kharkiv Aviation Institute, and is currently a Fulbright Fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies.

She is a Research Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and previously held a Doctoral Fellowship at CIGI’s Digital Policy Hub, with experience including a virtual residency at CIUS (University of Alberta), an internship at the European Parliament, and a non-residential fellowship with the NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence.