Europol Warns Against Abuse of ChatGPT

Europol’s European police forces warned on Monday about possible abuse of chat robots such as ChatGPT. Criminals could use them for phishing, other forms of cybercrime, or propaganda and disinformation.

The warning is primarily intended as an awareness campaign to start a dialogue with companies active in artificial intelligence (AI) to build precautions. Europol also strives to develop reliable AI systems.

ChatGPT can generate texts based on large amounts of data from, for example, books, articles or websites. ChatGPT was introduced to the general public in November of last year. The program is top-rated due to the sometimes astonishing results.

Unfortunately, non-experts can easily be misled: they then wrongly assume that texts or answers to questions come from a human instead of a machine.

Since ChatGPT can also produce codes for different programming languages, it is also a potentially valuable tool for criminals with little technical knowledge, according to Europol. Therefore, investigators should follow technological developments to prevent abuse.