Amsterdam, 27 March 2023 (dpa/MIA) – Artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT have a "dark side" and are ripe for criminal abuse, the European Union law enforcement agency Europol warned on Monday.

Europol said its Innovation Lab had organized workshops in response to the growing public attention given to ChatGPT to explore how criminals can abuse large language models (LLMs) and to assist investigators in their work.

The agency, based in The Hague, said it was focusing on three crime areas among many areas of concern: fraud and social engineering, disinformation and cybercrime.

With respect to the first, it said: "ChatGPT’s ability to draft highly realistic text makes it a useful tool for phishing purposes." Its ability to reproduce language patterns could be used to impersonate the style of speech of specific individuals or groups, Europol said.

On disinformation, it said that ChatGPT "excels at producing authentic sounding text at speed and scale," making it the model ideal for propaganda and disinformation purposes.

And on cybercrime, Europol noted that ChatGPT was capable of producing code in a number of programming languages. "For a potential criminal with little technical knowledge, this is an invaluable resource to produce malicious code," it said.