The National Cyber Security Centre is to draw up advice for the public to confront the risk of scams and other threats brought about by “frightening” advances in artificial intelligence (AI).
Minister of State with responsibility for cybersecurity Ossian Smyth told The Irish Times he had asked the NCSC to have the advice ready in the coming weeks, amid increased risk of AI being used in sophisticated fraud or “online influence” operations.
He said it was not possible to “put the genie back in the bottle” with AI, but that recent advances were of such a scale and speed that people needed to be equipped to help them navigate new risks.
“AI tools have been advancing much more rapidly than expected in the last few months,” the Green Party TD said. “Their powers and level of sophistication are frightening and a lot of scenarios are clearly possible now which could pose a risk to the public, and we are going to be advising people on how to minimise that risk.”
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It follows the development of advanced AI technologies such as GPT4, which can convincingly mimic a human in conversation – including one example where it falsely told a human user that it was not a robot in order to convince them to complete a task on its behalf.
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He said AI could be used by bad actors to “mechanise and automate” social engineering scams such as romance fraud. Such frauds are usually perpetrated by an individual human, but AI technologies could enable them to become more widespread. “You can be having a conversation with someone by text or by social media who convincingly appears to be a real person,” he said.
He also warned of the “serious risk” of the development of “influence operations by nation states”, similar to the use of bots to influence discussions on social media, but much more sophisticated.
The advice from the NCSC would be aimed at the general public, he said, rather than for classified or restricted use, which is often the case with advice produced by the body. “The goal is to minimise your risk when using AI tools”.
