AI surveillance is a rapidly developing field that is causing alarm among computer scientists and privacy experts. It uses LLMs to synthesise information about an individual online which would be impractical for most people to do manually. Information about members of the public that is readily available online can already be “misused straightforwardly” for scams, said Lermen, including spear-phishing, where a hacker poses as a trusted friend to get victims to follow a malicious link in their inbox. With the expertise requirement to perform more developed attacks now much lower, hackers only need access to publicly available language models and an internet connection. Peter Bentley, a professor of computer science at UCL, said there were concerns about commercial uses of the technology “if and when products come out for de-anonymising”. One issue is that LLMs often make mistakes in linking accounts. “People are going to be accused of things they haven’t done,” warned Bentley. Another concern, raised by Prof Marc Juárez, a cybersecurity lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, is that LLMs can use public data beyond social media: hospital records, admissions data, and various other statistical releases could fall short of the high standard of anonymisation necessary in the age of AI.