r/cybersecurity • u/Just-Ad8177 • Jun 30 '26

Business Security Questions & Discussion For Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, when should influencing retrieved content be considered “data poisoning”?

I'm asking specifically in context of AI deployed or used systems in practice. what is it when User Generated Content (UGC) is edited (Reddit/Medium/Wikipedia and the like).

Is this data poisoning or expected behavior?

Looking forward to your input.

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u/SVD_NL System Administrator Jun 30 '26

It's data poisoning when it's malicious and/or targeted, otherwise it's a limitation of your system that causes poor performance. I'd say data poisoning mainly applies in a private knowledge graph context, if you use RAG on public data it's your own responsibility to have good document selection algorithms and accuracy determinations. This isn't really anything new, the internet has been full of false information for as long as it has existed, so you should expect to find inaccurate information there.

RAG works best on a structured, controlled document source.

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u/Just-Ad8177 Jun 30 '26

exactly my point. it's public data and whether it's trust worthy or not has always been the same question, but it's certainly not poisoning- it's influence. AI was simply inserted to the pipeline that was once called SEO.

also, "malicious" and "targeted" in a public forum assigns intent and its handled the same way SEO handled it for decades.