Artificial Intelligence as a Weapon of Digital Warfare: Competing US and Iranian Narratives in Pakistan

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly become more than a technical facilitator to a strategic weapon of narrative competition, but empirical studies on how audiences in the Global South make sense of competing state discourses of AI-enabled digital warfare have yet to be conducted. The paper explores the exposure and perceptions of Pakistani university students to the United States and Iranian stories that AI becomes a digital warfare weapon in 2026. Using a stratified random sample, we sampled 400 undergraduate and postgraduate students in four major Lahore universities (University of the Punjab, Superior University, Government College University, and University of Central Punjab) with the help of strategic narrative theory, framing theory, and securitization theory. The information was obtained through a bilingual questionnaire in Google Forms that assessed the knowledge of AI, exposure to narratives, perceived credibility, perceived threat, and behavioral intent. SPSS v29 was used to perform descriptive statistics, paired t-tests, one-way ANOVA, and chi-square. Findings indicate that there is a heavy bias in favour of Iranian stories. Students reported more frequent exposure to Iranian-attributed AI content (M = 3.31, SD = 1.27) than US (M = 2.40, SD = 1.20) or Israeli content (M = 2.09, SD = 1.16) and rated Iranian narratives as significantly more credible, t(399) = 12.74, p < .001, d = 0.64. Although the US AI capabilities were perceived as a higher threat to Pakistan (M = 3.58 vs. 2.95), the latter did not lead to narrative trust. The slant did not differ significantly between universities, F(3, 396) = 0.98, p = .402, yet differed significantly between platforms, with significantly more users on TikTok and Instagram reporting high levels of Iranian narrative control, χ² (9) = 21.67, p = .010. Results indicate that narrative advantage in the context of the digital ecosystem in Pakistan is not based on technological excellence but rather on linguistic localization, platform formatting, and cultural connection.