Artificial Intelligence Crime: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Foreseeable Threats and Solutions

Artificial intelligence (AI) may play an increasingly essentialFootnote 1 role in criminal acts in the future. Criminal acts are defined here as any act (or omission) constituting an offence punishable under English criminal law,Footnote 2 without loss of generality to jurisdictions that similarly define crime. Evidence of "AI-Crime" (AIC) is provided by two (theoretical) research experiments. In the first one, two computational social scientists (Seymour and Tully 2016) used AI as an instrument to convince social media users to click on phishing links within mass-produced messages. Because each message was constructed using machine learning techniques applied to users' past behaviours and public profiles, the content was tailored to each individual, thus camouflaging the intention behind each message. If the potential victim had clicked on the phishing link and filled in the subsequent web-form, then (in real-world circumstances) a criminal would have obtained personal and private information that could be used for theft and fraud. AI-fuelled crime may also impact commerce. In the second experiment, three computer scientists (Martínez-Miranda et al. 2016) simulated a market and found that trading agents could learn and execute a "profitable" market manipulation campaign comprising a set of deceitful false-orders. These two experiments show that AI provides a feasible and fundamentally novel threat, in the form of AIC. The importance of AIC as a distinct phenomenon has not yet been acknowledged. The literature on AI's ethical and social implications focuses on regulating and controlling AI's civil uses, rather than considering its possible role in crime (Kerr 2004).