Page 32 - BusinessWest May 15, 2023

CYBERSECURITY >>
Rise of the Machines
AI Promises to Impact the Workforce in Unexpected Ways
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
wice a year, Tom Loper participates in a
Cybersecurity Advisory Council meeting. The last one was ... different.
“I would say there was a sense of con- cern that I hadn’t seen before at that coun-
cil because of ChatGPT and the phishing potential,” said Loper, dean of the School of Arts, Sciences and Management at Bay Path University.
He explained that people can use ChatGPT, the
AI chatbot that has drawn major worldwide atten- tion since its unveiling last fall, to input information from any website, or emails from an organization, to generate a phishing episode much more realistic, and
much more likely to draw a response, than its target had ever received.
“These are people — from Facebook, from Fidel- ity, from the Hartford, from every major organization you can think of in our area and beyond — who were taken aback by the capabilities of ChatGPT,” Loper said.
“It really scares the hell out of all of us, because we know the biggest problem that we have in cyber- security, the biggest challenge, comes between the brain and the keyboard,” he explained. “Human beings allow people in. The systems are very good at stopping people from breaching — flags go off, bells and whistles go off. But the biggest problem we have is the human intervention that has to take place. And human beings make mistakes. Especially when we’re
connected to the outside world, we make mistakes that allow phishing to take place.”
And ChatGPT just made that challenge even more daunting.
But the impact of this and other AI tools extend far beyond cyberthreats.
“AI has the ability to be as impactful as the inter- net — possibly even as impactful as electricity — on the way business is conducted,” said Delcie Bean, president and CEO of Paragus Strategic IT in Hadley. “We all knew this day was coming for a long time, but now it’s here, and by the end of this decade, the only businesses that will still be in business are the ones that embrace the change.”
Bean explained that these tools allow enormous amounts of work previously done by humans to be
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