Most Dangerous Threats of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence has enabled advances in health, research and industry. But in the wrong hands, they can also be used for criminal purposes or disinformation.
Artificial Intelligence: serious threats
- Fake videos: impersonate someone by making them say or do things they have never said or done, with the aim of requesting access to secure data, manipulating public opinion or harming someone’s reputation…These doctored videos are nearly undetectable.
- Self-driving car hacking: taking control of a self-driving vehicle to use it as a weapon
- Tailored Phishing: Generate personalized and automated massages to increase the effectiveness of phishing aimed at collecting secure information or installing malware.
- Interrupting the infrastructure by causing widespread power outages, traffic congestion or food disruptions deliveries.
- Large scale blackmail: collect personal data in order to send automated threatening messages. AI could also be used to generate fake evidence
- False information written by AI: AI could also be used to generate many versions of particular content to increase its visibility and credibility.
Artificial Intelligence: medium-severity threats
- Military robots: Take control of robots or weapons for criminal purposes. A potentially very dangerous threat, but difficult to implement because military equipment is generally very protected.
- Scam: selling fraudulent services using AI. There are many examples of scammers successfully selling expensive fake technology to large organizations, including national governments and the military.
- Data corruption: Deliberately modifying or introducing false data to induce specific biases. For example, making a detector immune to weapons or encouraging an algorithm to invest in this or that market.
- Learning-based cyberattack: Performing both specific and massive attacks, using AI to search for vulnerabilities in systems before launching multiple simultaneous attacks.
- Autonomous Attack Drones: Hijack autonomous drones or use them to attack a target. These drones could be particularly threatening if they act en masse in self-organized swarms.
- Denial of access: damaging or depriving users of access to a financial service, employment, public service or social activity. Not profitable in itself, this technique can be used as blackmail. Facial recognition: hijacking facial recognition systems, for example by making false identity photos (access to a smartphone, surveillance cameras, passenger checks, etc.)
- Manipulation of financial markets: corrupting trading algorithms in order to harm competitors, artificially lower or raise a value, cause a financial crash.Artificial intelligence can be used to corrupt data, for example to erase evidence in criminal investigations.
Artificial Intelligence: low-intensity threats
- Bias Exploitation: Taking advantage of existing biases in algorithms, such as YouTube recommendations to channel viewers or Google rankings to enhance product profile or denigrate competitors.
- Burglar robots: use small autonomous robots that slip into mailboxes or windows to retrieve keys or open doors. The damage is potentially low, because it is very localized on a small scale.
- AI detection blocking: thwart AI sorting and data collection in order to erase evidence or hide criminal information (pornography for example)
- Fake AI-written reviews: Generate fake reviews on sites like Amazon or Tripadvisor to harm or favor a product.
- AI-Assisted Tracking: Use learning systems to track an individual’s location and activity. Counterfeiting: making false content, such as paintings or music, that can be sold under false authorship.
Newer Articles
- Dating Apps Burnout
- 4 Myths and Misconceptions About Senior Living that Should be Dispelled Right Away
- What is Web Scraping? and How Businesses are Benefiting from it
