China's CCTV 3·15 gala named outbound-call firms, including Shanghai Xiaoke Information Technology, more than 34.79% owned by a Weimob Group subsidiary, over harassment marketing calls, an industry where AI robots voiced from real recordings are now mainstream. One robot costs about 10,000 yuan a year and averages upwards of a thousand calls a day, the report says.
An AI-made video used the face and voice of Zhang Boli, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, to promote a whitening skincare product he says he never used or promoted. Zhang says more than ten other fake videos of him are circulating; Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine asked cyberspace regulators to act against them.
A NewsGuard audit found that 10 leading chatbots, including ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini, repeated false narratives from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network 33.55% of the time, seven citing Pravda articles directly. Researchers say the 150-site network, publishing some 3.6 million articles a year to tiny human audiences, appears aimed at search engines and AI models.
