Back in the year 2000, I remember driving to a client meeting on the streets of Sydney and sitting in the car outside their office building trying to hack their network. We were selling network security, and this was our cyber equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. In the boardroom an hour later, we’d walk in and show them how easy it was to break into their system from a car sitting outside. And then they would hire us to fix it.
I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but we were breakers without evil intent. The memory came back to me this week as I read about how Google is experimenting with replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense and a writer tired of AI stealing his content has started feeding it “poison pill” stories to mislead the algorithm on purpose. There are entire hackathons united in their desire to break AI chatbots. This is a breaker movement, and I suspect it’s only going to get stronger. On the surface, anger and frustration with these new tools and their ubiquity is driving a lot of this behavior. The result, though, may ultimately be the same as it was 25 years ago with our street hacking scheme.
Eventually, the systems got better as teams like ours came in and figured out how to fix them. It’s almost unimaginable that anyone could hack into a system from a car parked outside a corporate headquarters today. The breakers create change, no matter what they break or how they break it. I’m not sure if that’s a conclusion that should give us hope or the opposite.