Manipulative chatbots just around the corner

Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain will merge to form ‘relationship data’ during 2018, according to the latest prediction.

According to Dr Scott Zoldi, chief analytics officer at FICO, as chatbots get smarter and use more AI they will not only understand us better, they will also be better at manipulating us.

“By quickly understanding the tone, content and predicted highest-value conversational paths to meet various objectives, chatbots using AI can also learn the magic words to sway our attitude, actions and possibly elicit en masse reactions,” he wrote on the FICO Blog.

Zoldi also believes that the growing use of blockchain technology in financial services will include a healthy dose of artificial intelligence, as new, automated analytic techniques look for patterns in the relationship data about people, contracts and transactions.

“Beyond its association with cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology will soon record ‘time chains of events,’ as applied to contracts, interactions and occurrences,” Zoldi wrote.

“Think about renting a car. In the future, you will be able walk up to a car to lease it, but you’ll do so with a micro-loan for which you are approved to lease the car for, say, an afternoon. This micro-loan will have insurance contracts attached to the blockchain, and a codified history of the car’s history of drivers, events, and maintenance. As you drive through the city and interact with toll roads and parking spaces, all of this information will be automatically recorded and monitored on the blockchain. When you leave the car and lock it, the lease is complete and auditable on the chain. These kinds of data event chains will create new opportunities for graph analytics and novel new AI algorithms to consume relationship data at scale.”

Zoldi, who leads the team that builds FICO’s AI analytics for solutions such as fraud management and cybersecurity, also sees a rise in what he calls ‘defensive AI’.

“Attackers use malicious AI and ML to circumvent the protective systems companies have in place,” he wrote.

“This arms race, in which criminals arm themselves with adversarial machine learning, tops McAfee’s 2018 security forecast. In 2018 we will see new systems that will seed their outputs with ‘faint signatures’ to mislead, confuse or identify the attackers learning the AI system’s response.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/the_lightwriter

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