AI and the War on Trust

The AI Revolution

A revolution of Artificial Intelligence has occurred in the past few years, leapfrogging previous machine learning systems, with LLMs (Large Language Models) taking front and center in this revolution. LLMs learn by training on large volumes of text scraped from the internet and other sources and, essentially, attempt to predictively guess what text should come next when presented with a prompt from a human (or another computer or AI). In addition, LLMs can be paired with powerful visual based tools relying on diffusion to conjure up images based on the input from LLMs. These tools have quickly gone from fringe tools to powerful mainstream tools that can enable people to code, create art or perform tasks in which they have no experience, with just a prompt into the tool.

Whenever humanity is handed a new and powerful tool, some people will always seek to use it for profit, disruption of existing paradigms and, of course, crime. From deep-fakes that allow you to create porn or embarrassing videos of celebrities (or victims) by simply training a model on their face, or malware that can program itself to avoid detection using LLMs, or enabling life-like chat bots that even the most observant humans have a difficult time detecting, there are ample and deep ways this technology can be abused. This technological revolution is going to change and disrupt many of the existing systems we rely on, both in cyber security and in society.