As the CEO of Infinitive, I spend a lot of time looking at technology trends. I wonder what technologies will be at the forefront of helping Infinitive’s clients achieve their business results. Recently, Artificial Intelligence has been in the spotlight. One interesting aspect of AI’s future is how AI battles AI in business.

Battlebots
Looking ahead, the only protection from a malevolent Artificial Intelligence (AI) application will be a benevolent AI application. From IBM’s groundbreaking Jeopardy! victory over two human experts in 2011 to the latest news about ChatGPT, the questions about AI’s ability to replace humans have continued to grow. Most AI advances have been around trivial competitions (like chess or Jeopardy!) or have focused on benign tasks such as using ChatGPT to write blogs faster. However, that is changing. Students are using ChatGPT to short-cut report writing and the learning that goes with actually researching and writing those reports. Educators need a way to determine whether the material was written by a student or an AI application. The answer? Use AI to detect AI.

ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a very popular generative AI tool that provides sophisticated responses to simple queries using a combination of its own algorithms, models and information from the internet. Despite ChatGPT’s relatively recent appearance on the technology scene, there are already cases of problems being created by the tool. A common problem is the use of ChatGPT by students in writing reports. Another issue is the use of ChatGPT by some employees to take on multiple full-time jobs without their bosses’ knowledge. The new term for this is being “overemployed”. Google is concerned about a proliferation of AI generated content. While Google’s search guidelines allow for “the appropriate use of AI” the guidelines have a caveat against using AI, “… to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings”. As anybody who has ever written content for commercial publication knows … manipulating the search rankings is a large part of their efforts.

One answer to thwarting the unsanctioned use of ChatGPT is to detect ChatGPT written text by using … ChatGPT! OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, allows free access to its AI Classifier. The classifier detects AI written text versus human written text. A teacher can see whether the term paper was written by the student or ChatGPT. A boss can test an employee’s blogs and Google routinely uses AI to look for AI generated content.

Unfortunately, OpenAI’s classifier comes with a lot of caveats. It doesn’t work well with short text; it sometimes confidently classifies AI generated text as human-written and visa-versa. One can confidently predict that some AI rapscallion will produce a product that takes ChatGPT output and “blurs it” to make it harder to automatically detect as AI-generated. The battle is joined.

Spam Battles
Marketers are forever trying to land their e-mails in the recipient’s main in-box while e-mail providers want to put mass-produced e-mails in the “promotions folder”. Both are using AI. The spam-blockers look for patterns that indicate mass marketing e-mails and decrease the reputation of sites that exhibit those patterns. The marketers use “warm up sites” and AI to create patterns that the blockers’ algorithms will see as legitimate.

Phishing Expedition
Phishing is the most common type of cybercrime today. Hackers are using generative AI to write credible e-mails for phishing attacks. One case involves asking ChatGPT to write an e-mail that notifies a potential victim that they have been removed from a LinkedIn Group based on inappropriate online behavior.