The Criminal Potential of Artificial Intelligence

This is an excerpt from the book "THE AI THOUGHT BOOK" AI can be implicated in crime in several ways. Most obviously, AI could be used as a tool for crime, using its capabilities to facilitate actions against real-world targets: predicting the behavior of people or institutions to discover and exploit vulnerabilities; generating fake content for extortion or to damage reputations; performing acts that human perpetrators cannot or will not perform themselves for reasons of danger, physical size, speed of response, etc. Although the methods are new, the crimes themselves may be traditional in nature -- theft, extortion, intimidation, terror. Alternatively, AI systems themselves may be the target of criminal activity: Circumventing protective systems that stand in the way of a crime; evading detection or prosecution of crimes already committed; causing trusted or critical systems to fail or misbehave cause harm or undermine public trust. AI could also provide context for a crime.