LONDON — Artificial intelligence is a “coming wave” which will supercharge terrorist propaganda and aid their preparation for attacks, the British government’s terrorism advisor warned Tuesday.
In his latest annual report, Jonathan Hall, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, warned of a “daunting” threat from “frontier technology” after a year spent looking the issue.
Hall warned that generative AI — which can create new content such as text, images, audio and video based on what it has learned from the data it has available to it — “will be exploited by terrorists,” and said Britain has historically been too slow to react to threats the internet has thrown up.
The report said most tech companies have “little reason to explain the inner workings of their models and effort they put into human welfare as they race for market share.” And it warned that there is already an industry for “jailbreaking” the ethical guardrails which tech companies have put in place to try and prevent chatbots from creating terrorist content.
Chatbots could, Hall warned, provide a “closed loop of terrorist radicalisation” for “lonely and unhappy individuals” open to seduction into real-world terrorism, and could even be used to screen potential terrorist recruits before passing them “upstream for human-to- human radicalisation.”
Hall’s report points out that Britain has been involved in the only example he has seen of attack planning done by a chatbot after Jaswant Singh Chail planned an attempted assassination of the now-late Queen with a crossbow alongside his “AI girlfriend.”
Hall noted that though he is unaware of any current “terrorism chatbot” the internet has “exposed a shoal of susceptible loners, including children, who might just prove particularly vulnerable to one- to-one chatbot radicalisation.”
Gen AI is “in principle” able to suggest methods for circumventing security and providing “tradecraft on using or adapting weapons or terrorist cell-structure,” he said — a particular draw to “lone attackers.”
AI-generated propaganda could, Hall warned, be tailored to “chime with local narratives, such as Britain’s own battle with grooming gangs. The tools can allow “bot armies” to flood forums and social media to “make a topic appear dynamic and current.”
Future threats could also involve generative AI identifying and synthesizing biological or chemical weapons, as well as writing code for cyberattacks.
Last year the British government announced a new Laboratory for AI Security Research, aimed at co-ordinating NATO and Five Eyes countries’ response in the AI arms race with hostile and terrorist states.
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