The evolution of computer crime.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4788909

Hacking Generative AI

Generative AI platforms, like ChatGPT, hold great promise in enhancing human creativity, productivity, and efficiency. However, generative AI platforms are prone to manipulation. Specifically, they are susceptible to a new type of attack called “prompt injection.” In prompt injection, attackers carefully craft their input prompt to manipulate AI into generating harmful, dangerous, or illegal content as output Examples of such outputs include instructions on how to build an improvised bomb, how to make meth, how to hotwire a car, and more. Researchers have also been able to make ChatGPT generate malicious code.

This article asks a basic question: do prompt injection attacks violate computer crime law, mainly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? This article argues that they do. Prompt injection attacks lead AI to disregard its own hard-coded content generation restrictions, which allows the attacker to access portions of the AI that are beyond what the system’s developers authorized. Therefore, this constitutes the criminal offense of accessing a computer in excess of authorization. Although prompt injection attacks could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, this article offers ways to distinguish serious acts of AI manipulation from less serious ones, so that prosecution would only focus on a limited set of harmful and dangerous prompt injections.

Perspective.

https://www.ft.com/content/cde75f58-20b9-460c-89fb-e64fe06e24b9

ChatGPT essay cheats are a menace to us all

The other day I met a British academic who said something about artificial intelligence that made my jaw drop.

The number of students using AI tools like ChatGPT to write their papers was a much bigger problem than the public was being told, this person said.

AI cheating at their institution was now so rife that large numbers of students had been expelled for academic misconduct — to the point that some courses had lost most of a year’s intake. “I’ve heard similar figures from a few universities,” the academic told me.

Spotting suspicious essays could be easy, because when students were asked why they had included certain terms or data sources not mentioned on the course, they were baffled. “They have clearly never even heard of some of the terms that turn up in their essays.”