The rapid rise of AI-generated dramas could open a new front in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cognitive warfare against Taiwan, according to Taiwanese scholars who warn that artificial intelligence is rapidly making influence operations cheaper, faster, and increasingly difficult to detect.
The warnings were raised during an Aug. 29 seminar hosted by the Taiwan Association for Security Studies titled “2026 China Threat Report: Into the Home, Heart and Mind — China’s Cognitive Warfare Against Taiwan,” (2026 中國威脅報告: 入戶入腦入心─認知作戰如何影響你的判斷). Experts at the event examined how Beijing’s influence operations have evolved beyond conventional disinformation and are now intertwined with military pressure, economic coercion, and emerging technologies.
Though Taiwan operates as an independent nation since its establishment in 1949, the CCP views the self-ruling island as a “breakaway province,” and has vowed to reclaim it by any means necessary, even if that means resorting to military force to achieve unification under its “One China” policy.
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‘Hybrid cognitive operations’
Huang Chao-nien, an associate professor at National Chengchi University’s Graduate Institute of National Development, said the CCP’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan should be understood within the broader geopolitical competition between authoritarian and democratic systems.
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Beyond promoting narratives intended to “tell China’s story well,” Beijing has sought to undermine its competitors by questioning U.S. reliability and suggesting Washington would abandon Taiwan, Huang said. Such efforts can also involve buying influence within media organizations, mobilizing local collaborators, and establishing covert networks for channeling money and information, he added.
Huang further described Beijing’s increasingly coordinated use of influence campaigns alongside gray-zone activities, normalized military exercises, and economic coercion as “hybrid cognitive operations.” China’s economic difficulties have provided an incentive for nationalist mobilization, he said, while changes in U.S. diplomacy and Taiwan’s election cycles have created additional opportunities for influence campaigns.
At the same time, the rapid development of generative AI has sharply reduced the cost and technical barriers associated with producing deepfakes and other manipulated content. Huang urged Taiwan to improve transparency surrounding financial influence operations, strengthen whistleblower protections, and establish greater oversight of digital platforms through legislation.
Influence operations running 24/7
Luo Cheng-tsung, a professor at the Graduate Institute of Technology, Law and Intellectual Property at National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, said cognitive warfare is also undergoing a fundamental technological shift. Operations that once depended heavily on human personnel can increasingly be automated with AI, allowing enormous quantities of adversarial content to be generated around the clock at relatively low cost.
Luo warned that Taiwan’s defense strategy remains heavily oriented toward conventional military hardware despite the growing threat posed by psychological and cognitive infiltration. He called for defense resources to be reallocated and for Taiwan’s military to recruit and retain personnel capable of countering Chinese information and cognitive warfare.
Ho Cheng-hui, deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association for Security Studies, said China and Russia have elevated cognitive warfare to the level of national strategy, treating it as a “sixth domain of warfare.”
A new battlefront
Modern influence operations no longer depend primarily on fabricated information, he said. Instead, authentic information can be selectively distorted at critical points, making manipulation considerably harder for the public to identify and flag.
Ho characterized Russia as favoring more aggressive efforts to fuel social polarization, while the CCP specializes in long-term structural infiltration and the whitewashing of narratives. The two can also reinforce selected narratives through state-controlled media and what he called “narrative laundering,” in which claims are repeatedly cited and amplified across different channels.
AI-generated entertainment could make those tactics even more difficult to counter. Ho said AI dramas still contain noticeable flaws, but the technology is likely to improve. Because the videos are easy to consume, highly engaging, and particularly popular among certain age groups and communities, they could provide an effective vehicle for influence operations.
AI content increasingly difficult to detect
If cognitive-manipulation messages are subtly embedded within such entertainment, he warned, they could exert significant influence over targeted audiences. Traditional fact-checking alone may be poorly equipped to counter that threat. Ho said existing approaches are largely reactive, time-consuming, and focused on individual claims, leaving them unable to keep pace with massive quantities of automatically generated content.
He advocated a more proactive strategy modeled partly on European efforts to counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), including tracing illicit financial flows, freezing assets linked to influence operations, strengthening digital regulation, and increasing algorithmic transparency.
The scholars warned that Beijing’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan has evolved from isolated disinformation campaigns into a sustained operation increasingly integrated with military, economic, and technological pressure.
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