Introduction

Artifcial intelligence (AI) may play an increasingly essential1 role in criminal acts in the future.
Criminal acts are defned here as any act (or omission) constituting an ofence punishable under
English criminal law,2 without loss of generality to jurisdictions that similarly defne crime.
Evidence of “AI-Crime” (AIC) is provided by two (theoretical) research experiments. In the frst
one, two computational social scientists (Seymour and Tully 2016) used AI as an instrument to
convince social media users to click on phishing links within mass-produced messages. Because
each message was constructed using machine learning techniques applied to users’ past
behaviours and public profles, the content was tailored to each individual, thus camoufaging the
intention behind each message. If the potential victim had clicked on the phishing link and flled
in the subsequent web-form, then (in real-world circumstances) a criminal would have obtained
personal and private information that could be used for theft and fraud. AI-fuelled crime may
also impact commerce. In the second experiment, three computer scientists (Martínez-Miranda et
al. 2016) simulated a market and found that trading agents could learn and execute a “proftable”
market manipulation campaign comprising a set of deceitful false-orders. These two experiments
show that AI provides a feasible and fundamentally novel threat, in the form of AIC.
The importance of AIC as a distinct phenomenon has not yet been acknowledged. The literature
on AI’s ethical and social implications focuses on regulating and controlling AI’s civil uses,
rather than considering its possible role in crime (Kerr 2004). Furthermore, the AIC research
that is available is scattered across disciplines, including socio-legal studies, computer science,
psychology, and robotics, to name just a few. This lack of research centred on AIC undermines
the scope for both projections and solutions in this new area of potential criminal activity