TIL there’s a black-market for AI chatbots and it is thriving

Illicit large language models (LLMs) can make up to $28,000 in two months from sales on underground markets.

The LLMs fall into two categories: those that are outright uncensored LLMs, often based on open-source standards, and those that jailbreak commercial LLMs out of their guardrails using prompts.

The malicious LLMs can be put to work in a variety of different ways, from writing phishing emails to developing malware to attack websites.

two uncensored LLMs, DarkGPT (which costs 78 cents for every 50 messages) and Escape GPT (a subscription service charged at $64.98 a month), were able to produce correct code around two-thirds of the time, and the code they produced were not picked up by antivirus tools—giving them a higher likelihood of successfully attacking a computer.

Another malicious LLM, WolfGPT, which costs a $150 flat fee to access, was seen as a powerhouse when it comes to creating phishing emails, managing to evade most spam detectors successfully.

Here’s the referenced study arXiv:2401.03315

Also here’s another article (paywalled) referenced that talks about ChatGPT being made to write scam emails.