AI Scammers Are Better at Building Trust Than Humans

Researchers from four universities studied how generative AI chatbots (programs trained on large amounts of text that can generate human-like responses) perform in "pig butchering" scams, text-based romance fraud that eventually leads to fake cryptocurrency investment schemes. In experiments, AI chatbots outperformed human scammers at building trust with potential victims during the long relationship-building phase, with nearly half of test subjects complying with the chatbot's requests compared to fewer than one in five for human scammers. The study suggests AI could eventually automate most of the scam process, with humans only taking over at the final stage to bypass safeguards built into large language models (AI systems trained on vast text to predict and generate language).