Hateful content online is rising, researchers told ABC News, because some large language models (LLMs) that operate AI chatbots are easily manipulated and the guardrails in place are largely insufficient in distinguishing between legitimate vetted material like university-backed research and hateful content and conspiracy theories spewed in open online forums.

"AI has made it possible to scale up any kind of inaccurate information you can and generate it very fast. That's one of the reasons why it has become a big problem," Ashique KhudaBukhsh, a computer scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology who studies LLMs, said.

"Now we have systems that can create antisemitic content by scale; the bots can spread this content throughout the internet at scale because you don't have to rely on humans to generate it."