Designing AI-Enabled Countermeasures to Cognitive Warfare

Foreign information operations on social media platforms pose significant risks to democratic societies. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), this threat is likely to intensify, potentially overwhelming human defenders. To achieve the necessary scale and tempo to defend against these threats, utilizing AI as part of the solution seems inevitable. Although there has been a significant debate on AI in Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), it is equally likely that AI will be widely used in information operations for defensive and offensive objectives. Similar to LAWS, AI-driven information operations occupy a highly sensitive moral domain where removing human involvement in the tactical decision making process raises ethical concerns. Although AI has yet to revolutionize the field, a solid ethical stance is urgently needed on how AI can be responsibly used to defend against information operations on social media platforms. This paper proposes possible AI-enabled countermeasures against cognitive warfare and argues how they can be developed in a responsible way, such that meaningful human control is preserved.