Europol warns against criminal use of ChatGPT app

Europol warned on Monday that AI-based chat apps such as ChatGPT have a dark side and could be vulnerable to criminal hacking.

Europol said its creative lab had organised workshops to counter growing public interest in ChatGPT to explore how criminals can misuse large language models and to help investigators in their work.

The Hague-based agency added that it focuses on three areas of crime among many areas of concern: "forgery and social engineering, disinformation and cybercrime."

On the first, the agency said: "ChatGPT's ability to design a very logical text makes it a useful tool for phishing purposes, and its ability to reproduce language patterns that can be used to impersonate the speech style of certain individuals or groups."

Regarding disinformation, the agency said that "ChatGPT excels at producing an original text quickly, making it the ideal model for propaganda and disinformation purposes."

Europol pointed out that in terms of cybercrime, ChatGPT is capable of producing code in a number of programming languages, and for a potential criminal with limited technical knowledge, this is an invaluable source of malicious code production.