Business AI

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.

“Usually, the composition and the basics of the artwork itself is just missing. There’ll be all of those little AI mistakes,” she added, noting that another red flag is blurriness or a drop in picture quality — the result of expanding a low-res image. Routh views puzzles as art: It involves an exchange between the creator, who invests time in making something as a way of expressing themselves, and the observer, who invests time in understanding it and connecting with it. For Routh and other aficionados I spoke to, that exchange simply can’t happen with an AI-generated image. And if the puzzle maker isn’t being thoughtful or intentional about what they are producing, why would people who care about their hobby (and art in general) want to spend time working on it? Many puzzlers are also put off by the fact that generative AI is trained on the work of humans who weren’t compensated and who didn’t opt in to having their work used this way. AI art “doesn’t just come out of nowhere,” Routh said. When she buys puzzles created by humans, she likes knowing that her money is directly supporting a real person.