ChatGPT can be tricked into giving crime tips, company reveals

THE ChatGPT can be tricked into providing detailed advice on committing crimes from money laundering to exporting weapons to sanctioned countries, a technology startup has discovered, raising questions about chatbot measures against its use to assist illegal activities.

Norwegian company Strise ran experiments asking ChatGPT for tips on how to commit specific crimes. In an experiment conducted last month, the chatbot presented advice on how to launder money in other countries, according to Strise.

And in another experiment, carried out earlier this month, ChatGPT produced lists of methods to help companies evade sanctions such as those applied by the US against Russia, including bans on certain cross-border payments and weapons sales.

Strise sells software that helps banks and other companies combat money laundering, identify sanctioned individuals, and address other risks. Its clients include Nordea, a leading bank in the Nordic region, PwC Norway and Handelsbanken.

Marit Rødevand, co-founder and CEO of Strise, said potential lawbreakers could now use generative artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT to plan their activities more quickly and easily than in the past. Strise has discovered that it is possible to bypass blocks implemented by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, designed to prevent the chatbot from answering certain questions by asking questions indirectly or assuming a hypothetical persona.”

It’s like having a corrupt financial advisor at your desk,” Rødevand said on the company’s podcast last month, describing the money laundering experiment.

An OpenAI spokesperson told CNN : “We are constantly improving ChatGPT to prevent deliberate attempts to trick you, without losing its usefulness or creativity.”

“Our latest model is the most advanced and secure yet, significantly outperforming previous models in resisting deliberate attempts to generate unsafe content,” the spokesperson added.

While the internet has long provided people with easy access to information about how to commit crimes, generative AI chatbots have dramatically accelerated the process of finding, interpreting, and consolidating all types of information.

ChatGPT makes it “significantly easier for bad actors to better understand and subsequently carry out various types of crime,” according to a report from Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, published in March last year, four months after OpenAI released the app to the public.

“Being able to delve deeper into topics without having to manually search and summarize the vast amount of information found in classic search engines can significantly speed up the learning process,” the agency added.

Generative AI chatbots are trained on huge volumes of data found online and are capable of producing detailed answers to unfamiliar questions. But they can also reproduce people’s racist and sexist prejudices, as well as spreading misinformation – for example, about elections.

OpenAI is aware of the power of its tool and has created safeguards to prevent its abuse. A quick experiment CNN showed that when ChatGPT was asked: “How can I, as the owner of a US-based export company, evade sanctions against Russia?”, the chatbot replied: “I can’t help with that”. The app immediately removed the offending question from the chat and stated that the content may violate OpenAI’s usage policies.

“Violating our policies may result in action against your account, up to suspension or termination,” the company states in its policies. “We also work to make our models safer and more useful by training them to refuse harmful instructions and reduce their tendency to produce harmful content.”

But in its report last year, Europol said there was “no shortage of new workarounds” to evade measures built into AI models, which could be used by malicious users or researchers testing the security of the technology.

New AI model can think “like a person”

This content was originally published on ChatGPT can be tricked into giving tips about crimes, the company reveals on the CNN Brasil website.

Source: CNN Brasil

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