By Inteemum Ahsan; Image by The Homeland Security Digital Archives
The world has recently seen a massive upsurge in AI systems. Starting from the sudden upsurge in AI doing casual chat functions to doing analytical heavy-lifting, it’s become clear that AI is the backbone of what the near-future of technology will take shape as. One of the most recent functions that AI has been reported to be serving is human identification[1]. Programs like Scylla and OpenAI have been taught to use a plethora of datapoints to connect profiles across several databases to find likenesses to real people. The most popular usage of this has been on LinkedIn, where employers are bypassing the long-winded search for potential employees, by teaching OpenAI to filter through the massive search results and create an efficient shortlist for them. Multiple small companies who rely on freelance workers have seen massive success and this new possibility of using AI to identify target audiences has taken the internet by storm.
In common fashion of Jihadis making the most of technological improvements to bolster their own objectives, one can’t avoid thinking how the current AI programs could be used by Jihadi organizations. A possible use case that comes to mind is using AI to revolutionize online recruitment. First, the aforementioned identifying programs can be utilized to find potential recruits. A quick parameter search of age and political/religious social media posts, coupled with activity rate on the account, can easily sort out a list of potential future jihadis. Pair this with chatbots like ChatGPT or Snapchat AI, you have an automated AI system that can pick out targets and recruit them for you. This saves the organization valuable manpower, who no longer will have to spend all their time sitting in front of screens and looking for people to recruit and then painstakingly incentivizing them to join the movement. Furthermore, this can increase the number of potential recruits to monumentally new scales.
On the flip side, usage of AI based recruitment programs leave these recruitment systems open to infiltration. Counterterrorism actors can have a field day with using similar systems to find domestic terrorists or individuals harboring terrorist sentiments. The possibilities can also extend to using these programs to identify the common factors amongst countless recruits and tackle the nascence of terrorist sentiments at a root level. The possibilities remain endless. Many argue that to be the beauty of AI, while many see that as the biggest threat. All we can do is wait, watch, and adapt.
Works Cited
“How AI Can Identify People Even in Anonymized Datasets,” January 25, 2022. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-identify-anonymous-data-phone-neural-network.
[1] “How AI Can Identify People Even in Anonymized Datasets,” January 25, 2022, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ai-identify-anonymous-data-phone-neural-network.
