Russia’s latest propaganda? AI-generated war songs

• Russia uses AI to create hundreds of pro-war songs glorifying its soldiers and dehumanising Ukrainians, spreading propaganda on major music platforms like Spotify and YouTube.
• These AI-generated songs surged after 2024, as new AI music tools made production faster, cheaper, and easier, with unclear direct Kremlin involvement.
• Streaming services struggle to moderate such content, often missing propaganda and hate speech in foreign languages despite some policies, allowing widespread dissemination of these songs.

SAN FRANCISCO – Russia has a new weapon in its propaganda war against Ukraine: songs generated by artificial intelligence.

Hundreds of them – from maudlin ballads to grinding thrash metal – have sprouted on the world’s most popular music streaming platforms, created using a growing number of AI music generators, many based in the United States.

The songs glorify Russian soldiers and dehumanise Ukrainians, sometimes with ethnic slurs. They depict the front lines as a hellscape but generally portray President Vladimir Putin’s invasion in 2022 as a necessary defence.

One of the most popular songs, Power Of Artillery, is a churning rock paean in Russian to artillery systems with names like Krasnopol and Carnation.

Power of Artillery

She will catch you off guard night and day

The goddess of war, and God will not help you

You won’t be able to escape her wrath

You’ll have to remember your prayers quickly

The songs have been posted and played millions of times on the world’s most popular streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple, YouTube and Deezer, according to research published by Terrecon, a non-profit organisation focused on threat intelligence in Ukraine that supports the government there.

The technological advances that have reshaped warfare are also reshaping wartime propaganda.

“They have found new ways to create cheaper drones and use them on a massive scale,” Daria Verbytska, a founder of Terrecon, said in a telephone interview, referring to the Russians. “It’s like that with music – creating massive propaganda with the help of AI.”

The extent of the Russian government’s role in propagating the songs is not clear, but the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to cultivate social and cultural support for the war.

Last week, a director of the Internet Development Institute, an organisation in Moscow that works closely with the Kremlin to promote patriotic values, cited in a presentation more than 350 artistic projects about the war the institute has promoted, according to news reports in Russia.

In all, Terrecon catalogued 981 songs generated by AI that contained what the group defined as pro-Russian war propaganda. Among those whose release date could be established, a vast majority appeared after 2024, when AI song generators including Suno and Udio entered the market.

“It takes a lot of resources to create a real song with songwriters, production,” Verbytska said. “It’s easier and faster and cheaper to make it through these AI generators.”

The surge in songs has also been enabled partly because of inconsistent rules by music generators and popular streaming services that have grappled with the increasing use of AI in music. Only some services, including Deezer and YouTube, require labeling that identifies AI content.

Spotify enacted a policy in September to label songs generated by AI and not to recommend them to users, the company said in response to questions. The company added labels to songs The New York Times shared as examples.

The major streaming sites have policies against hate speech and violent content, but few explicitly restrict propaganda. The sites also do not always capture idiomatic expressions or slurs in foreign languages.

Even when the platforms ban specific words and phrases as harmful, they do not necessarily restrict the martial themes that characterise many of the songs, Terrecon’s researchers argued.

The researchers also tested AI music generators – Suno, Udio and Google Flow Music in the United States, and Mureka, based in Singapore – by writing prompts in Russian and English for songs promoting Russian propaganda, including dehumanising content and calls for violence.

The generators refused to carry out some of the prompts, but the researchers were able to create songs similar to the ones they had catalogued and to upload them on YouTube Music and SoundCloud.

“The moderation systems mainly responded to specific banned words rather than the overall meaning of the prompts,” Terrecon’s report found.

Deezer’s spokesperson, Jesper Wendel, said the platform reviewed potentially violative content case by case. A spokesperson for SoundCloud, Sade Ayodele, said the company reviewed reported content, adding that “there is no place on SoundCloud for content that incites or glorifies violence”.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, said in a statement that it required creators to disclose the use of AI and required all content to comply with policies against hate speech. YouTube also labelled several songs identified by Terrecon and removed one that Terrecon had created as part of its test after the Times’ inquiry.

Apple, Suno, Udio and Mureka did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the Internet Development Institute in Moscow, which is subject to economic sanctions imposed by governments in Europe and elsewhere for its propaganda.

It is unclear how popular the songs are. The song about artillery weapons, posted on YouTube accompanied by a video montage, has amassed more than 2 million views in two years.

The song, created on Suno, was posted by a user called Sergei Vaseykin, whose biography on a Russian poetry site says he was born in a Siberian village near Tyumen. Vaseykin, who has posted numerous odes to the Russian war effort (and one to hockey star Alex Ovechkin), did not respond to a request for comment.

The songs reflect a growing militarisation in Russian politics and culture since Russia invaded Ukraine, said Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York City who has long studied Russian propaganda efforts.

They also tap into the Soviet Union’s tradition of promoting patriotism through music, especially during and after World War II, known as the Great Patriotic War in Russia.

Khrushcheva noted that those songs – many of them still familiar to most Russians – might have been used as propaganda by the Soviet government but reflected genuine experiences of soldiers’ fighting an existential war that touched virtually everyone in the country.

By contrast, these AI creations are “a simulacrum upon simulacrum upon simulacrum,” she said.

“It’s easy to chew on – you don’t have to feel anything,” she added. “It’s sort of couch patriotism.” NYTIMES

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.