Sounds like a complaint acquaintance. “I’m disappointed that you are working on including AI garbage on the site,” one irate person wrote in an anonymous online message. “No one is asking for this – we want you to improve the site and stop charging for new features.”
Except this isn’t just an average Internet user complaining that artificial intelligence is being forced into their favorite app. Instead, they complain about the cybercrime forum’s plans to introduce more generative artificial intelligence. Like millions of other people, low-level fraudsters, scammers and hackers are nervous about AI encroaching on their lives and the increasing posting of low-quality AI information in their online communities.
“People don’t like it,” says Ben Collier, a security researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. As part A recent research on how Collier and other researchers have noticed growing opposition to the employ of generative artificial intelligence in underground cybercrime forums and hacking groups.
Over the past few years, amid the boom and buzz around generative AI, some users posting on hacker forums have moved from positive attitudes about how AI can support hacking to more skeptical of the technology, according to the study, which also included researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Strathclyde.
Researchers analyzed 97,895 AI-related conversations on cybercrime forums from the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 to the end of last year. Complaints were found about people abandoning “bullet point explanations” of basic cybersecurity concepts, complaining about the number of low-quality posts, and concerns about AI-powered overhauls of Google’s search engines reducing forum visitors.
For decades, cybercrime message boards and marketplaces, often of Russian origin, have allowed fraudsters to do business together. These are places where stolen data can be traded, hacking jobs advertised, and scammers post nonsense about their rivals. While scammers often try to scam each other, forums also have a sense of community. For example, users develop a reputation for reliability, and forum owners organize writing competitions.
“These are essentially social spaces. They really hate the other people they use [AI] on forums,” says Collier. He argues that groups’ social dynamics could be disrupted by would-be cybercriminals trying to gain a better reputation by posting AI-generated explanations of hacking. “I think a lot of them are a little bit ambivalent about AI because it undermines their claim to being a skilled person.”
Posts reviewed by WIRED on the Hack Forums, a self-proclaimed space for people interested in talking about hacking and sharing techniques, show the annoyance caused by people creating posts using artificial intelligence. “I see a lot of members using AI to create their threads/posts and it pisses me off because they don’t even take the time to write a simple sentence or two,” one poster wrote. Another put it more bluntly: “Stop posting nonsense about artificial intelligence.”
Collier says that in several cases, users of many forums seem irritated by AI posts because they want to make friends. “If I wanted to talk to an AI chatbot, there are plenty of sites where I can do that… I come here to connect with people,” reads one of the posts cited in the study.
Since ChatGPT launched in delayed 2022, there has been a lot of interest in AI’s hacking capabilities and how the technology could transform online crime. Both sophisticated hackers and less skilled ones try to employ artificial intelligence in their attacks. While some organized fraudsters have improved their operations with increasingly realistic AI face-swapping technology and AI-translated social engineering messages, much attention has been paid to the ability of generative AI to write malicious code and discover vulnerabilities.