Cybercrime Might Be the One Job AI Isn’t Taking, Study Suggests
Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Strathclyde researchers analyzed 97,895 cybercrime forum threads posted after ChatGPTs launch.“Dark AI” tools like WormGPT generated cultural buzz but produced almost no working malware, while jailbroken chatbots are increasingly hard to keep working for more than a few days.The biggest measurable AI-driven crime is not hacking. It is mass-produced SEO spam, romance scams, and AI-generated nudes sold for a dollar each. For three years, cybersecurity firms, governments, and AI labs have warned that generative AI would unleash a new generation of supercharged hackers. According to a new academic paper that actually went and looked, the supercharged hackers are mostly using ChatGPT to write spam and generate nudes for fun. The study, titled Stand-Alone Complex or Vibercrime?, was published on arXiv by researchers from Cambridge and other universities and aims to understand how the cybercrime underground is actually adopting AI, not how cybersecurity vendors say it is. “We present here one of the first attempts at a mixed-methods empirical study of early patterns of GenAI adoption in the cybercrime underground,” researchers wrote. The team analyzed 97,895 forum threads posted after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, drawn from the Cambridge Cybercrime Centres CrimeBB dataset of underground and dark web forums. They ran topic