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fliptop [soylentnews.org] writes:

Thanks to large language models, a single scammer can run hundreds or thousands of cons in parallel, night and day, in every language under the sun [wired.com]:

Here’s an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. It’s an interesting experiment, and the results are likely to vary wildly based on the details of the experiment.

But while it’s an easy experiment to run, it misses the real risk of large language models (LLMs) writing scam emails. Today’s human-run scams aren’t limited by the number of people who respond to the initial email contact. They’re limited by the labor-intensive process of persuading those people to send the scammer money. LLMs are about to change that.

[...] Long-running financial scams are now known as pig butchering [wired.com], growing the potential mark up until their ultimate and sudden demise. Such scams, which require gaining trust and infiltrating a target's personal finances, take weeks or even months of personal time and repeated interactions. It's a high stakes and low probability game that the scammer is playing.

Here is where LLMs will make a difference. Much has been written about the unreliability of OpenAI's GPT models and those like them: They “hallucinate” frequently, making up things about the world and confidently spouting nonsense. For entertainment, this is fine, but for most practical uses it’s a problem. It is, however, not a bug but a feature when it comes to scams: LLMs’ ability to confidently roll with the punches, no matter what a user throws at them, will prove useful to scammers as they navigate hostile, bemused, and gullible scam targets by the billions. AI chatbot scams can ensnare more people, because the pool of victims who will fall for a more subtle and flexible scammer—one that has been trained on everything ever written online—is much larger than the pool of those who believe the king of Nigeria wants to give them a billion dollars.

[...] A single scammer, from their laptop anywhere in the world, can now run hundreds or thousands of scams in parallel, night and day, with marks all over the world, in every language under the sun. The AI chatbots will never sleep and will always be adapting along their path to their objectives. And new mechanisms, from ChatGPT plugins [openai.com] to LangChain [langchain.dev], will enable composition of AI with thousands of API-based cloud services and open source tools, allowing LLMs to interact with the internet as humans do. The impersonations in such scams are no longer just princes offering their country's riches. They are forlorn strangers looking for romance, hot new cryptocurrencies that are soon to skyrocket in value, and seemingly-sound new financial websites offering amazing returns on deposits. And people are already falling in love with LLMs.

[...] Companies like OpenAI attempt to prevent their models from doing bad things. But with the release of each new LLM, social media sites buzz with new AI jailbreaks that evade the new restrictions put in place by the AI's designers. ChatGPT, and then Bing Chat, and then GPT-4 were all jailbroken within minutes of their release, and in dozens of different ways. Most protections against bad uses and harmful output are only skin-deep, easily evaded by determined users. Once a jailbreak is discovered, it usually can be generalized, and the community of users pulls the LLM open through the chinks in its armor. And the technology is advancing too fast for anyone to fully understand how they work, even the designers.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security [schneier.com].

Original Submission