Abstract
A review was conducted to identify possible applications of artificial intelligence and related technologies in the perpetration of crime. The collected examples were used to devise an approximate taxonomy of criminal applications for the purpose of assessing their relative threat levels. The exercise culminated in a 2-day workshop on ‘AI & Future Crime’ with representatives from academia, police, defence, government and the private sector. The workshop remit was (i) to catalogue potential criminal and terror threats arising from increasing adoption and power of artificial intelligence, and (ii) to rank these threats in terms of expected victim harm, criminal profit, criminal achievability and difficulty of defeat. Eighteen categories of threat were identified and rated. Five of the six highest-rated had a broad societal impact, such as those involving AI-generated fake content, or could operate at scale through use of AI automation; the sixth was abuse of driverless vehicle technology for terrorist attack.
Highlights
Technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have seen dramatic increases in capability, accessibility and widespread deployment in recent years, and their growth shows no sign of abating
While the most visible AI technology is marketed as such (e.g. ‘personal assistants’ such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Home), learning-based methods are employed behind the scenes much more widely
As AI technology expands in capability and deployment, so do the risks of criminal exploitation
Summary
Technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have seen dramatic increases in capability, accessibility and widespread deployment in recent years, and their growth shows no sign of abating. AI could be employed as a tool for crime, making use of its capabilities to facilitate actions against real world targets: predicting the behaviour of people or institutions in order to discover and exploit vulnerabilities; generating fake content for use in blackmail or to sully reputations; performing feats that human perpetrators are unable or unwilling to do themselves, for reasons of danger, physical size, speed of reaction and so on.
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