AI-Powered Bad Actors: A Looming Threat for 2024 and Beyond
By GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Their methodology includes searching
for terminology listed in the Anti-Defamation League Hate Symbols Database, as
well as identifying groups flagged by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
From an initial list of “bad-actor”
communities found using these terms, the authors assess communities linked to
by the bad-actor communities. The authors repeat this procedure to generate a
network map of bad-actor communities—and the more mainstream online groups they
link to.
Mainstream Communities Categorized as “Distrust Subset”
Some mainstream communities are categorized
as belonging to a “distrust subset” if they host significant discussion of COVID-19, MPX, abortion, elections, or climate change.
Using the resulting map of the current online bad-actor “battlefield,” which
includes more than 1 billion individuals, the authors project how AI may be
used by these bad actors.
The authors predict that bad actors will
increasingly use AI to continuously push toxic content onto mainstream
communities using early iterations of AI tools, as these programs have fewer
filters designed to prevent their usage by bad actors and are freely available
programs small enough to fit on a laptop.
AI-Powered Attacks Almost Daily by Mid-2024
The authors predict that such bad-actor-AI
attacks will occur almost daily by mid-2024—in time to affect U.S. and other
global elections. The authors emphasize that as AI is still new, their
predictions are necessarily speculative, but hope that their work will
nevertheless serve as a starting point for policy discussions about managing
the threats of bad-actor-AI.
Reference: “Controlling bad-actor-artificial
intelligence activity at scale across online battlefields” by Neil F Johnson,
Richard Sear and Lucia Illari, 23 January 2024, PNAS
Nexus.
DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae004