How AI Chatbots May Produce Security Concerns

In recent years, artificial intelligence has grown in popularity. This technology’s tools enable more to be completed with less money, time, and energy, freeing up resources for other productive purposes. AI chatbots, for example, have acquired enormous acceptance in recent years, to the point that practically every corporation now owns a chatbot in their name. Chatbots significantly improve consumer engagement and assist businesses in dramatically improving their customer service. It is amazing to see the expanding use of chatbots since it is only natural for firms to minimize expenses by adopting such software and putting their labor to better use. But, according to this article on the MIT Technology Review website, there may be possible security threats that we are overlooking.

The article suggests that it is fairly simple to jailbreak AI chatbots. The capacity of chatbots to follow instructions, which they are praised for, is also one of the key elements that demonstrate their vulnerability to exploitation. According to the article, jailbreaking is simple because “prompt injections,” in which someone uses prompts that encourage the language model to violate its earlier directions and safety guardrails, allow a person to access and abuse the program. Second, the article implies that AI chatbots may be readily utilized for scamming and phishing. Since AI-enhanced virtual assistants scrape text and pictures from the web, they are vulnerable to a sort of attack known as an indirect prompt injection, in which a third party modifies a website by inserting secret text intended to influence the AI’s behavior, according to the article. Once that occurs, the AI system may be controlled to allow the attacker to attempt to get people’s credit card information, for example. Finally, the article claims that AI models are vulnerable to assault even before they are implemented. Big AI models are trained on massive volumes of data gathered from the internet. As a result, by poisoning the data set with enough instances, it is quite simple to permanently impact the model’s behavior and outputs.

While using AI chatbots appears to be a simple way to eliminate manual work and enhance customer service, the preceding paragraph covers a few critical security issues that are often disregarded. What makes matters worse is that there are currently no solutions for the aforementioned security vulnerabilities related to AI chatbots.