Today everyone has ChatGPT on their lips and it is being sold as the solution to many problems by its defenders, and as the arrival of the seven plagues of Egypt in one by its detractors. Be that as it may, it is nothing more than a tool and as such it can be put to good and bad uses. And it is that AI can also be used by criminals.
We are not saying it, but it is Europol itself that warns that delinquents and criminals would be using ChatGPT to carry out their acts. All this comes from a report created by several police officers of the European Union about the failures that the famous chat based on AI in the face of citizen security. What conclusions have they reached? Well, they are not encouraging, since they consider that it is a tool that can be used in various types of different crimes.
How can criminals use ChatGPT?
Europol has given three examples where ChatGPT can help criminals carry out their acts of vandalism, thus making this tool almost the same as a knife. That although it is used for cooking, we can also use it to hurt or kill another person.
- ChatGPT can be used to generate much more credible texts in order to scam people with Phishing techniques. In particular, its capabilities could be used by foreign criminals specialized in these types of scams to pass them off more naturally. Since the reader would see it as natural language.
- They also talk about how this ability can be used to create propaganda and misinformation to recruit people for terrorist groups and destructive sects. All this can be combined with the use of image-generative AIs for the creation of false information that can be used for the generation of false news.
- There have been cases, in which the AI has given confidential private data, which can have a serious danger.
- Lastly, ChatGPT would be used by criminals to create malware. While not everything the AI generates is functional or correct, it does have the ability to understand and write code. So it opens up the ability to create malware of all kinds.
The conclusion to all this? We believe that Europol is being exaggerated, in any case, we do not have knowledge about crime and criminality like they do. So in all this, they must know something that we do not know.
These are not the only examples of misuse of ChatGPT
For many years, viral marketing has become a way of using word of mouth among people to influence purchase intent. ChatGPT-type AIs are being used to ask for purchase recommendations for various products and what they do is read huge amounts of reviews to draw a conclusion. Well, while they are not criminal acts, there are already people writing fake reviews, both positive and negative, to influence the AI to make product recommendations.
This can create a huge loss of trust in the system and give a bad image to many large online stores such as Amazon or AliExpress. Although it should not affect the after-sales support systems of specific brands about their products, it does affect large digital surfaces and can become a serious problem. Let’s not forget that not everyone has enough knowledge to make the best decisions at the time to buy certain products.
ChatGPT depends on the information that is given to it as input and that data if it is not filtered is a problem. This will be a problem on these platforms and for brands that will have to hire staff to remove misinformation and FUD about their products.