How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators

What happened

This essay was written with Seva Gunitsky, and originally appeared in Foreign Affairs . Two weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast.

No one has protested the war on Russian television since then, partly as a result of tighter security and a general climate of fear. But in October 2024, Margarita Simonyan, one of Russia’s chief propagandists, gave another explanation.

A growing number of the RT network’s anchors, she explained to an interviewer, are not real. They were, she meant, produced by artificial intelligence.