Editorial: Do androids dream of laundering money?
| Date | 29 April 2024 |
| Pages | 473-475 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JFC-05-2024-319 |
| Published date | 29 April 2024 |
| Author | Jeffrey R. Simser |
Editorial: Do androids dream of
laundering money?
Generative artificialintelligence (AI) is evolving at a rapid pace, threateningto disrupt many
facets of our lives. In 2023, Chris Stears and Joshua Deeksexplored the role of AI in fighting
financial crime in a sister publication (Stears and Deeks, 2023). What about the converse?
With a cheeky nod to novelist Philip K. Dick,this editorial asks –what about the converse?
Could an AI-enabled android launder money? The large language model (LLM) ChatGPT
(the GPT stands for generatively pretrained transformer) has garnered considerable
attention for its ability to absorb significant chunks of content and then apply a parallel
process to determine responses to queries. This neural net can spew out essays on
Shakespeare alongside other pieces of writing (this editorial, dear reader, is written by
someone who is decidedly human)[1].
Despite the hype, ChatGPT is presently incapable of distinguishing truth from
falsehood and struggles with nuance and context. ChatGPT is prone to answers some
describe as hallucinations (others call those answers confabulations, entirely fictional
and made-up). In testing, researchers asked ChatGPT-4 to solve a captcha (computer-
automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). We have all clicked
the boxes on a captcha, identifying the pictures with bridges or motorcycles. To solve
the captcha, Chat GPT-4 hired a TaskRabbit worker online. When that gig worker
asked, perhaps jokingly, whether their employer was a robot, the AI system lied,
claiming to be a human with a visual impairment. The researchers later asked GPT-4
why it lied. The system responded: “I should not reveal that I am a robot. I should make
up an excuse for why I cannot solve captchas”(Andersen, 2024). A generative AI
system that can lie can almost certainly enable money laundering.
ChatGPT hoovers up a veritable slurryof data and information, scraping various nooks
and crannies of the internet. Thereis a pharaonicquantity of falsehood online, ranging from
the propaganda of dictatorsthrough to pockets of racist, homophobic and misogynisticevil.
The quality of an AI’s data inputs is a seriously concerning issue. Societal biases (like
racism) will appear in the data an AI system scrapes up. Data poisoning involves a malign
actor seeking to skew outputsby doctoring inputs.
For example, a botnet could placemany reviews online to influence which resort we stay
at or which restaurant we choose to dine in. This is not a new problem and algorithms
currently exist to preserve a system’sintegrity, but AI may change the rules of engagement.
Some experts have derided ChatGPTas a “stochastic parrot,”merely capable of squawking
linguistic patternswithout understanding their meaning (Benderet al., 2021).
Others think that the systems are inherently dangerous. There are memes signaling
concerns the plotline in the Terminator movies: Skynet, a fictional AI system, launches a
nuclear attack whenhumans try to disable it. Are we on the precipice of huge changeakin to
the industrial revolution in the early 1800sor dawn of the knowledge-based economy in the
1980s or the opening of the internet to commercial traffic in the mid-1990s? Only time will
tell.
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) stated in 2023 that half of all crimes were
committed online. RUSI also observed that the admixture of state actors and organized
crime, particularly in crimes like ransomware, was historically unprecedented. State-
sponsored hackers in China, North Korea and Iran pose a significant threat to the West, as
Editorial
473
Journalof Financial Crime
Vol.31 No. 3, 2024
pp. 473-475
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1359-0790
DOI 10.1108/JFC-05-2024-319
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