Criminals are set to take advantage of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT to execute scams and other cybercrimes, Europe’s policing agency warned on Monday.
From phishing to disinformation and malware, the rapidly growing abilities of chatbots will be operated not just to improve mankind but to scam it too, Europol said in a new report. OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in November and was quickly grabbed upon by users shocked at its capacity to respond to tough questions clearly, write poems or code, and even pass exams.
The potential exploitation of these types of AI systems by criminals provides a grim outlook.”
The Hague-based Europol said.
Europol’s new “Innovation Lab” examined the use of chatbots as a whole but focused on ChatGPT during a sequence of workshops as it is the highest-profile and most widely used, it said.
It added that criminals could use ChatGPT to “speed up the research process significantly” in areas they know nothing about. This could include preparing text to commit fraud or give details on “how to break into a home, to terrorism, cybercrime and child sex abuse, it added. The chatbot’s capacity to imitate speech styles made it extremely useful for phishing, in which users are tempted to click on fake email connections that then attempt to rob their data.
ChatGPT’s capability to rapidly create authentic-sounding text makes it ideal for propaganda and disinformation purposes, as it lets users generate and circulate messages echoing a specific narrative with relatively little effort. ChatGPT can also be used to write computer code, especially for non-technically minded criminals, Europol said.
This type of automated code generation is particularly useful for those criminal actors with little or no knowledge of coding and development.”
Europol said.
An early study by US-Israeli cyber threat intel company Check Point Research (CPR) revealed how the chatbot can be used to enter online systems by creating phishing emails, Europol said.
While ChatGPT had guards including content moderation, which will not respond to questions that have been classified dangerous or personal, these could be circumvented with clever prompts, Europol said. AI was still in its earlier stages and its abilities were “expected to further improve over time,” it added.
It is of the highest importance that awareness is raised on this matter, to confirm that any potential loopholes are discovered and closed as quickly as possible.”
Europol said.
