ChatGPT and the use of artificial intelligence have not only surprised the world with its scope, but have raised many concerns and worries, not only in the academic and scientific world, but also among authorities.
ChatGPT’s ability to write highly realistic text at high speed and scale makes this artificial intelligence tool a resource for fraud and misinformation, but also an ally of cybercriminals with little technical knowledge when generating code in various programming languages, Europol warned.
Extended language models like ChatGPT have a “dark side”, admits the police coordination agencywhich published this Monday, March 27, its first report on the possible exploitation of this type of artificial intelligence systems by criminals, something that, it says, “offers a bleak picture” and a new challenge for law enforcement. .
The current model of public access to ChatGPT, capable of processing and generating human-like text, can answer questions on a variety of topics, translate text, chat, generate new content and produce functional code, but also facilitate criminal activities ranging from help criminals remain anonymous until specific crimes, such as terrorism and child sexual exploitation.
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Europol’s Innovation Lab joined the growing public attention paid to Chat GPTa chatbot that rivals like Bard (Google) and Bing (Microsoft) have already started. Europol experts have investigated how criminals can abuse these Long Language Models (LLMs).
concerns
They have identified numerous areas of concern, but three relevant areas stand out.
The first is its way of facilitating fraud, phishing, and social engineering tasks.l, since ChatGPT’s ability to write very authentic texts is a game changer: the most basic phishing was easy to detect since it used messages and emails full of grammatical and spelling errors, but now it is possible to impersonate a organization or individual realistically and with little knowledge of English.
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“Until now, this type of deceptive communication has been something that criminals had to produce on their own. In the case of mass-produced campaigns, victims of this type of crime were often able to identify the inauthentic nature of a message due to obvious spelling or grammatical errors or its vague or inaccurate content,” notes Europol.
With artificial technology, these “phishing” and virtual fraud can be created “in a faster, much more authentic way and on a significantly larger scale”, and allow “responding to messages in context and adopting a specific writing style”, he warns.
“ChatGPT’s capabilities lend themselves to a number of potential abuse cases in the area of terrorism, propaganda and disinformation. The model can be used to collect more information in general that may facilitate terrorist activities, such as terrorist financing or anonymous file sharing,” he says.
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Furthermore, this type of application not only facilitates the perpetration of disinformation, hate speech and terrorist content on the internet, but would also allow users to “give it misplaced credibility as it is machine generated and therefore Therefore, it may seem more objective to some that it was produced by a human.”
Along with fraud and disinformation, Europol highlights cybercrime as a third area of concern, as ChatGPT is not limited to generating human-like language, but is also capable of producing code in several different programming languages, with a variety of practical results in a matter of minutes by entering the correct indications on the web page of this tool.
“It is possible to create basic tools for a variety of malicious purposes. Although they are only basic, this provides a start for cybercrime, since it allows someone without technical knowledge to exploit an attack vector on a victim’s system, ”the agency underlines in its report.
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The security measures that prevent ChatGPT from generating code with potential malicious use only work if the tool understands what it is doing, but given directions that break down into individual steps, it is “trivial to circumvent these security measures.”
A more advanced user can also exploit the enhanced capabilities of ChatGPT to further refine or even automate sophisticated modus operandi of cybercriminals.
