A cautionary tale about large language models
4 APRIL 2023 (Lille, France) – –The International Cybersecurity Forum opens here tomorrow for a 3-day run so we thought the following report was a timely addition to your preparation.
In response to the growing public attention given to ChatGPT, the Europol Innovation Lab organised a number of workshops with subject matter experts from across Europol to explore how criminals can abuse large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, as well as how it may assist investigators in their daily work. Their insights are compiled in Europol’s first Tech Watch Flash report which was published last week.
NOTE TO READERS: there is a longer and more in-depth version of the report but it was produced for law enforcement only. We have a link to the public version below.
The aim of the report is to provide an overview of both the known and potential misuse of ChatGPT, and to open a dialogue with Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies to help them build in better safeguards, and to promote the development of safe and trustworthy AI systems.
The following three crime areas are amongst the many areas of concern identified by Europol’s experts:
• Fraud and social engineering: ChatGPT’s ability to draft highly realistic text makes it a useful tool for phishing purposes. The ability of LLMs to re-produce language patterns can be used to impersonate the style of speech of specific individuals or groups. This capability can be abused at scale to mislead potential victims into placing their trust in the hands of criminal actors.
• Disinformation: ChatGPT excels at producing authentic sounding text at speed and scale. This makes the model ideal for propaganda and disinformation purposes, as it allows users to generate and spread messages reflecting a specific narrative with relatively little effort.
• Cybercrime: In addition to generating human-like language, ChatGPT is capable of producing code in a number of different programming languages. For a potential criminal with little technical knowledge, this is an invaluable resource to produce malicious code.
As technology progresses, and new models become available, it will become increasingly important for law enforcement to stay at the forefront of these developments to anticipate and prevent abuse.
To read Europol’s recommendations and the full findings of the public report please click here.
