As artificial intelligence reshapes global communications, Israeli and Jewish tech innovators and organizations are developing new AI-powered tools to counter misinformation and antisemitism online while working to ensure an accurate representation of Israel in digital spaces.
“AI is the next step in the technological advancement of human information consumption,” said Yana Indy Greenman, a former VP for Strategy and Policy at Israel’s Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure. “As we have seen with Google, Wikipedia, and social media, if we don’t want it to be weaponized against us, we must get involved in safeguarding it and creating positive AI tools for the future before our enemies do so.”
Greenman, who grew up in the Former Soviet Union, is a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and currently resides in Dunedin, New Zealand. She told JNS that there is an urgency in addressing this challenge: “Most people don’t know that Israel is a democratic country. For decades they have received the message that Israel is a radical colonizer. Now it is almost impossible to change a person’s mind once they believe in something. I know. I grew up in a society that used brainwashing all too well.”
According to Greenman, Israelis are naive about what the world has undergone in the past 20 to 30 years. “There has been an incredible amount of anti-Israel messaging out there and we simply have no idea the extent of it. We cannot allow what happened with the weaponization of social media and Wikipedia, to take place again with AI,” she said.
Combating hate speech
Several organizations are developing AI solutions to address these challenges each in their own way. Shiran Mlamdovsky Somech, a tech industry veteran and founder of Generative AI for Good, organized “Hack the Hate,” a major conference held on Sept. 10, 2023, at Microsoft’s Tel Aviv offices in partnership with the Unit 8200 Alumni Association that addressed online hate speech and antisemitism.
“The hate speech and antisemitism is like David versus Goliath,” Mlamdovsky Somech told JNS. “We are only 15 million Jews around the world, versus 2 billion Muslims, not counting far-right groups and other forms of antisemitism. Our slingshot is technology.”
One significant initiative called “Bottom Line,” founded by Ariella Noveck and former IDF Spokesperson Jonathan Conricus, has developed an AI chatbot providing journalists with reliable, real-time information about Middle East events.
“Our AI bot ensures that information provided is reliable by sourcing and citing verified data in real-time,” Noveck explained. “It allows journalists to ask specific, timely questions about world events as they happen, and if the bot doesn’t have the answer, it immediately pings a Bottom Line expert to provide verified information.”
Noveck emphasized the importance of proactive education rather than reactive criticism: “It’s always better to address misinformation proactively and prevent it from happening in the first place, rather than simply reacting with online comments, op-eds, or criticism. Often, if we attack journalists we will lose them in the future. It is difficult to hold a journalist accountable for misrepresenting a story when all the source material they have is slanted in one direction. By educating journalists, and providing them with reliable, factual, and unbiased source information, we can alleviate the problem of the negative headline before it even happens, and gain the goodwill of the journalist for the future.”
Responding to anti-Israel posts online
Another significant development is Reasonate, created by Ariel Halevi’s company, Vayomar. The platform uses AI to help users construct effective responses to anti-Israeli statements online.
“Instead of training people, I could train an agent, but that isn’t the ideal. People are looking for connection” Halevi said. “So we are providing people with an assisted conversational tool that gives them immediate information and tactics of how to respond, not just what to say, but psychological tactics to deescalate an online confrontation and actually get the other person you are interacting with to listen.”
Halevi told JNS that his system, although fully developed, is in its fledgling state of use. He said it is similar to Grammarly in that it can sit on the browser of a user and highlight any anti-Israeli statement that the user has a problem addressing. “Reasonate would then automatically generate a response based on the principles of persuasion that it has been developed with, which are a cumulation of more than two decades of experience we have built up at Vayomar,” he explained.
Mlamdovsky Somech highlighted another critical challenge: the need to digitize historical archives to ensure accurate AI training data. “We have very impressive archives like Yad Vashem, but most of the data is not digitized,” she said. “This makes it difficult for AI large language models (LLMs) to access accurate information about historical events. We have situations happening where AI is already coming up with potential profiles of Holocaust survivors but the information being given over is completely inaccurate. It is urgent that we digitize historical archives that can help train and preserve important historical information, and add it to the AI datasets before it becomes erased, lost, or fabricated.”
Other new initiatives include the Facts Commando project by Boaz Drei, which developed a system allowing thousands of volunteers to share pro-Israel content across social media platforms efficiently, and Atchalta, founded by Eran Shayshon, which uses AI and mind mapping technologies and combines it with their own specially developed methodology to develop new approaches to combating antisemitism for organizations by emphasizing a cohesive and comprehensive approach to change the ecosystem in which antisemitism thrives.
Creating a united front
One thing that all of the founders of these initiatives agree upon is that beyond developing new AI technologies, the most important aspect of combating antisemitism in person or online and changing the narrative of anti-Israel sentiment is to build and create a united front among the Jewish and pro-Israel community.
“We need to be working together, only by creating a united front, it doesn’t have to be unified, but it has to be united, can we change the current narrative and flip the script on antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment,” Shayshon added.
The role of education
Mlamdovsky Somech and Greenman both said that education plays a huge role in helping people become more moderate or even pro-Israel and against antisemitism. “It’s really a question of education,” Mlamdovsky Somech said. “AI can help us mold the narrative and keep the narrative unbiased, but the long-term solution is education. We need to be more hands-on and make the truth more accessible to the children in schools and students on campuses worldwide. We need to fight ignorance. We can do that somewhat via social media, but we cannot limit ourselves to fighting only there. In the long term, we need to work within the education system where opinions are developed in the first place.”
The success of AI initiatives such as these will play a crucial role in any future discourse about Israel and in slowing down or stopping the wave of antisemitism. As AI is used more and more as the main source of online information, it is rapidly becoming the next location where public opinion and narrative are created and developed.
Greenman warned: “In a few years, once all of the data gets uploaded from the information war that started on October 7th, AI systems might present a distorted view of Israel. That will shape minds and opinions for the future, and that is what we need to avoid long-term from happening.”