The mass-commercial push into generative AI has, not surprisingly, led to increasingly vocal concerns about its potential for abuse by malicious actors seeking to scale disinformation campaigns and cyber-enabled influence operations. However, while ‘Gen IO’ does indeed present a serious and growing threat, the extreme rhetoric that frequently underpins the conversation is often unhelpful, misplaced, focused on inconsequential details, and overlooks current constraints in both the technology and the environment in which IO threat actors operate. This talk proposes five points of nuance that the Gen IO conversation currently misses, with the hope that they can help steer defenders towards more informed paths for tackling the threat as generative AI continues to proliferate.
