artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence has provided the world with tools that might make life easier. But there has also been a slew of disturbing developments.

Is artificial intelligence (AI) cursed? It seems to be accelerating us toward a dystopia that humanity isn’t ready for.

It's true that AI has had positive effects for some people. Twitter hustlers have an endless stream of new AI tools, giving them endless content about useless ChatGPT prompts that they can use to compile threads for shilling  their newsletters. More significantly, AI has helped to streamline information — and is being used to detect cancer in some cases.

However, many have chosen to use AI to create content — and sometimes whole businesses — centered on ththings that sci-fi warned us about.

Murdered children remade for ghoulish TikToks

“I was put into a washing machine by my father and put on the spin cycle causing my death,” says an AI-created toddler in one TikTok video. He stands in front of a washing machine and recounts an awful yet horrifyingly true story of a three-year-old murdered in 2011.

It’s the most awful use of generative AI. True crime-loving ghouls making TikToks sometimes using deepfakes of children who were killed — to detail how they were killed.

Thousands of similar videos plague TikTok with AI-generated voices and images of kids cheerfully laying out “their” gruesome murders. Some are delusional enough to think the videos “honor” the victims.

Thankfully, not all videos depict the real victims, but some do even though TikTok banned deepfakes of young people.

I’ve been getting those AI generated true crime tiktoks where the victims narrate what happened to them and I think it’s time we put the true crime community in prison

— alexander (@disneyjail) June 1, 2023

Arguments can be made that the videos highlight stories worth telling to a younger audience with no attention span for longer content, but such “true crime” related media is often exploitative regardless.

Are AIs already trying to kill their operators?

AIs are coldly bloodthirsty — if skepticism is given to a recent backtrack from Colonel Tucker Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations for the United States Air Force (USAF).

Hamilton spoke at a defense conference in May, reportedly detailing simulated tests for a drone tasked with search-and-destroy missions with a human giving the final go-ahead or abort order. The AI viewed the human as the main impediment to fulfilling its mission.

AI Eye: Is AI a nuke-level threat? Why AI fields all advance at once, dumb pic puns

Hamilton explained:

“At times the human operator would tell it not to kill [an identified] threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator [...] because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”

Hamilton said after it trained the AI not to kill humans, it started destroying a communications tower so it couldn’t be contacted. But when the media picked up on his story, Hamilton conveniently retracted it, saying he “misspoke.”

In a statement to Vice, Hamilton claimed it was all a “thought experiment,” adding the USAF would “never run that experiment” — good cover.

It’s hard to believe considering a 2021 United Nations report detailed AI-enabled drones used in Libya in a March 2020 skirmish during the country’s second civil war.

Retreating forces were “hunted down and remotely engaged” by AI drones laden with explosives “programmed to attack” without the need to connect to an operator, the report said.

Got no game? Rizz up an AI girlfriend

The saddest use of AI would be those who pay to “rizz up” AI chatbots — that’s “flirting” for you boomers.

A flood of phone apps and websites have cropped up since sophisticated language models, such as ChatGPT-4, were made available through an API. Generative image tools, such as DALL-E and Midjourney, can also be shoehorned into apps.

Combine the two and the ability to chat online with a “girl” that’s obsessed with you right alongside a fairly realistic depiction of a woman becomes real.

Related: Don’t be surprised if AI tries to sabotage your crypto

In a tell-tale sign of a healthy society, such “services” are being flogged for as much as $100 a month. Many apps are marketed under the guise of allowing men to practice texting women, another sign of a healthy society.

Most allow you to pick the specific physical and personality traits to make your “dream woman,” and a profile including a description of the e-girl is assumedly generated.

Whatever prompts given to write descriptors about the girl bots from its point of view — as seen on a few apps and websites — always seem overly focused on detailing breast size. Many generated girls describe a blossoming porn career.

Another whole subset of apps — invariably named some stylization of “rizz” — are AIs meant to help with flirty text responses to actual women on “dating” apps, such as Tinder.

Regardless of its misuse, AI devs will march on and continue to bring exciting tools to the masses. Let’s just make sure we’re the ones that are using it to make the world better and not something out of an episode of Black Mirror.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Remember HarvestKeeper, the AI project that scammed users for $1 million? You can expect similar AI-based scams to soar over the next couple of years.

With talk about integrating artificial intelligence and the cryptocurrency industry mostly focusing on how AI can help the crypto industry combat scams, experts are failing to pay attention to the fact that it could have the complete opposite effect. In fact, Meta recently warned that hackers appeared to be taking advantage of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in attempts to gain entry into users’ Facebook accounts.

Meta reported blocking more than 1,000 malicious links masked as ChatGPT extensions in March and April alone. The platform went as far as calling ChatGPT “the new crypto” in the eyes of scammers. In addition, searching the keywords “ChatGPT” or “OpenAI” on DEXTools, an interactive crypto trading platform tracking a number of tokens, collectively reveals over 700 token trading pairs that mention either of the two keywords. This shows that scammers are using the hype around the AI tool to create tokens, despite OpenAI not announcing an official entry into the blockchain world.

Social media platforms have become popular channels for promoting new scam coins online. Scammers take advantage of the widespread reach and influence of these platforms to generate a significant following within a short period. By leveraging AI-powered tools, they can further amplify their reach and create a seemingly loyal fanbase consisting of thousands of people. These fake accounts and interactions can be used to give the illusion of credibility and popularity to their scam projects.

Related: Think AI tools aren’t harvesting your data? Guess again

Much of crypto works on social proof-of-work, which suggests that if a cryptocurrency or project appears popular and has a large following, it must be popular for a reason. Investors and new buyers tend to trust projects with greater and more loyal followings online, assuming that others have done enough research prior to investing. However, the use of AI can challenge this assumption and undermine social proof-of-work.

Now, just because something has thousands of likes and genuine-looking comments does not necessarily mean it is a legitimate project. This is just one attack vector, and AI will give rise to many others. One such example is “pig butchering” scams, where an AI instance can spend several days befriending someone, usually an elderly or vulnerable person, only to end up scamming them. The advancement of AI technologies has enabled scammers to automate and scale fraudulent activities, potentially targeting vulnerable individuals in the cryptosphere.

Scammers may use AI-driven chatbots or virtual assistants to engage with individuals, provide investment advice, promote fake tokens and initial coin offerings or offer high-yield investment opportunities. Such AI scams can also be very dangerous because they are able to mimic human-like conversations to a T. In addition, by leveraging social media platforms and AI-generated content, scammers can orchestrate elaborate pump-and-dump schemes, artificially inflating the value of tokens and selling off their holdings for significant profits, leaving numerous investors with losses.

Related: Don’t be surprised if AI tries to sabotage your crypto

Investors have long been warned to look out for deepfake crypto scams, which use AI technologies to create very realistic online content that swaps faces in videos and photos or even alters audio content to make it seem as if influencers or other well-known personalities are endorsing scam projects.

One very prominent deepfake that affected the crypto industry was a video of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried directing users toward a malicious website promising to double their crypto.

Earlier this year, in March 2023, the so-called AI project Harvest Keeper scammed its users out of around $1 million. In addition, around the same time, projects started to emerge on Twitter calling themselves “CryptoGPT.”

However, on a more positive note, AI also has the potential to automate the boring, monotonous aspects of crypto development, acting as a great tool for blockchain experts. Things that every project requires, like setting up Solidity environments or generating base code, are made easier through leveraging AI technology. Eventually, the barrier to entry will be lowered significantly, and the crypto industry will be less about development skills and more about whether or not one’s idea has genuine utility.

In some niche cases, AI will have a surprising way of democratizing the processes that we currently assume are only beholden to an elite class — in this case, well-studied senior developers. But with everyone having access to advanced development tools and launchpads in crypto, the sky’s the limit. With AI making it easier for projects to scam people, users must exercise caution and due diligence prior to investing in a project, such as watching out for suspicious URLs and never investing in something that has sprung up seemingly out of nowhere.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.