Customer service

• The UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has even set up a summit to discuss AI safety.
• And we’re already seeing the early stage adoption of AI by criminals.
• Observing how criminals have adapted to, and adopted, technological advances in the past, can provide some clues as to how they might use AI.

1. A better phishing hook

• However, this technology could also help criminals sound more believable when contacting potential victims.
• Think about all those spam phishing emails and texts that are badly written and easily detected.
• Phishing is a numbers game: an estimated 3.4 billion spam emails are sent every day.

2. Automated interactions

• One of the early uses for AI tools was to automate interactions between customers and services over text, chat messages and the phone.
• Criminals can use the same tools to create automated interactions with large numbers of potential victims, at a scale not possible if it were just carried out by humans.

3. Deepfakes

• Deepfake technology in video and audio is an example of this.
• So is the data to train it, which can be gathered from videos on social media, for example.
• This deepfake can be exploited to interact with friends and family, convincing them to hand criminals information on you.

4. Brute forcing

• This is where many combinations of characters and symbols are tried in turn to see if they match your passwords.
• Brute forcing is resource intensive, but it’s easier if you know something about the person.
• All of this information would go into making the profile, making it easier to guess passwords and pins.

Healthy scepticism

• But as with any new technology, society needs to adapt to and understand it.
• Although we take smart phones for granted now, society had to adjust to having them in our lives.
• We should develop our own approaches to it, maintaining a healthy sense of scepticism.