Artificial intelligence research group OpenAI last month made the unusual announcement: It had built an AI-powered content creation engine so sophisticated that it wouldn't release the full model to developers. Anyone who works in cybersecurity immediately knew why. Phishing emails, which try to trick recipients into clicking malicious links, originated 91 percent of all cyberattacks in 2016, according to a study by Cofense Inc. Combining software bots to scrape personal information from social networks and public databases with such a powerful content generation engine could produce much more persuasive phishing emails that might even mimic a certain person's writing style, said Nicolas Kseib, lead data scientist at TruSTAR Technology LLC. The potential result: Cybercriminals could launch phishing attacks much faster and on an unprecedented scale. That danger neatly sums up the never-ending war that is the state of cybersecurity today, one in which no one can yet answer a central question: Will artificial intelligence provide more help to criminals or to the people trying to stop them?

Unless you've had your head in the sand over the past few years, you'll have heard about the unprecedented -- and largely unexpected -- advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Perhaps the most public example of this was when Google's company DeepMind used an AI called AlphaGo to beat one of the world's top Go players in 2016. Today, it plays a role in voice recognition software -- Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant. It's helping retailers predict what we want to buy. It's even organising our email accounts by sorting the messages we want to see from those we don't.

What negative impact could AI have? It's clear that AI – like any technology – could be used for corrupt means. Adversarial AI (where inputs can be carefully crafted to trick AI systems into misclassifying data) has already been demonstrated. It could, for example, make an AI vision system that recognises a red traffic light, perceive a green one instead – which could have disastrous ramifications for an autonomous vehicle.