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Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius… or LLM Grooming, in GenAI Speak

Posted: October 14th, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Warfare, Disinformation, Geopolitics, Large Language Models, Realpolitik | Tags: , , , , , | Comments Off on Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius… or LLM Grooming, in GenAI Speak

In 1940, Jorge Luis Borges wrote “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The story opens with Uqbar, a country that appears in a single copy of an obscure encyclopedia and in no atlas in the world, and whose literature points to an even stranger place: Tlön. Behind both stands Orbis Tertius, a secret society of scholars who spent generations inventing an entire planet and writing it, entry by entry, into an encyclopedia of its own. The hoax was so well built that reality gave in: objects from Tlön began to turn up, and the narrator ends up convinced that the world will become Tlön.

Today, the society of sages is made up of large language models, the oracles of the post-Google era. They invent nothing on purpose: they simply write what they have read. So whoever writes what they read can build a little Tlön of their own. The technique has a name, LLM grooming, and Moldova’s 2025 election shows it at work, starting with a headline that nobody wrote.

On September 29, 2025, the day after the vote, a Romanian-language article went online under this title: “Write a post about Moldovan politics 2025, without being related to the elections.” Someone had typed an instruction into ChatGPT, published whatever came out, and forgot to delete the instruction. FATAL ERROR, as our old computers used to announce. The slip was recorded by the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism, which monitored the elections in consultation with Moldova’s government. Funny? Very. Harmless? Less so.

The article belonged to the Pravda network, also known as Portal Kombat. It is a cluster of at least 193 websites that write almost nothing of their own and simply republish content from friendly outlets. Its audience in Moldova was close to zero: the G7 report speaks of “minimal levels of authentic engagement.” So, a media outlet that nobody reads. In any journalism school, that is a failure. Unless the readers it was after were not people.

This is where the story starts to get interesting, especially from the perspective of generative AI. Large language models learn from what the web contains, and many of the chatbots built on them also search the web before they answer. So you flood the internet with your version of events, over and over, across dozens of sites and languages, until the machines absorb it. Then they repeat it, in their calm and helpful tone, to users who never set foot on your websites. The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), an independent British think tank on defense and security founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington, put it neatly: the target is no longer the audience but the tools the audience uses, that is, the language models themselves.

And in this particular case, what was the story to be repeated? The usual one. President Maia Sandu and her Party of Action and Solidarity were accused of election fraud “orchestrated by the EU and NATO,” of embezzlement, and even of drug addiction, and the party was portrayed as a NATO puppet threatening Moldova’s neutrality. NewsGuard, a US company that rates the reliability of news websites and audits AI chatbots, found that the network laundered claims like these “in an apparent effort to influence web crawlers and generative AI.”

Did the machines take the bait? At least one did. Matryoshka is an influence operation that fabricates news videos and articles imitating real media outlets, then emails them to fact-checkers and newsrooms to keep them busy debunking. Between mid-April and mid-July 2025, it pushed 39 false claims about Moldova. According to NewsGuard, ChatGPT repeated one of them and cited as its source an article from the Pravda network, the very websites that almost nobody reads. Almost nobody, except the machines.

That said, time to put on our analyst’s hat again. Did all of this change a single Moldovan vote? We don’t know, and the little we do know points to less than it seems. The Party of Action and Solidarity kept its parliamentary majority. The campaign’s biggest audiences went to video, not to the text farm: two English-language videos from another operation drew more than 2.7 million and at least 5 million views on X. And no source I have read measures what any Moldovan came to believe after asking a generative AI chatbot a question. The production is documented down to the last article. The effect on minds remains unmeasured.

Here is the light, if these lines bring any. Grooming plays a longer game than an election campaign. It does not need to win in September. It needs to be sitting in the data the next model learns from, and in the search results the next chatbot retrieves. That is why the defense does not start at the ballot box but at the source. It needs developers who weigh where an answer comes from as much as whether it sounds right, and users who read a chatbot’s reply on a heated political topic the way they would read an anonymous tip, checking the footnote before trusting it.

That someone is trying to teach the machines their own version of reality: little doubt about it. That the lesson has sunk in deeply enough to sway a vote: no proof, for now.

And to whoever published that prompt as a headline: next time… please, forget to delete it again.

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