TOKYO – A 25-year-old man has been served a fresh arrest warrant for allegedly creating a computer virus using generative artificial intelligence (AI), the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)'s cybercrime control division announced on May 28, in what is believed to be the first such case in Japan.
Ryuki Hayashi, an unemployed resident of the Kanagawa Prefecture city of Kawasaki, was served the warrant on suspicion of making electronic or magnetic records containing unauthorized commands.
Hayashi is accused of creating a virus similar to ransomware, which destroys computer data and demands ransom in cryptocurrency, using his home computer and smartphone on March 31, 2023. He has reportedly admitted to the allegations, telling police, “I thought I could do anything by asking AI. I wanted to make easy money.”
Computer virus. Okay. Phew.
Though a computer virus could someday be just as deadly as a regular virus.
Should have asked AI how to avoid getting caught
Nice try, FBI
– GPT4
There is no way the virus functioned. Seriously. The guy had no tech background.
Apparently the warrant was served only after an discovering evidence from an unrelated (or semi-related?) arrest? The article didn’t specify if his ransomware worked, but I doubt it did if it was mostly GPT-generated. I guess the intention and confession is enough to make charges stick though. Wouldn’t be surprised if whatever GPT service he used also flagged him as suspicious and led authorities to him.
Japan has a suspiciously high conviction rate though (>99%). They either don’t even go for criminals they are not sure about or there’s some form of tampering going on. Hard to say.
The conviction rate is 99.3%. By only stating this high conviction rate it is often misunderstood as too high—however, this high conviction rate drops significantly when accounting for the fact that Japanese prosecutors drop roughly half the cases they are given. If measured in the same way, the United States’ federal conviction rate would be 99.8%.[14][15][16]
From wikipedia.
Comparing Japan to a prison colony makes it look a little more reasonable.
I don’t agree with most western philosophies of prison, the US is probably the worst amongst them (but most of that comes at the state level), I was just highlighting that Japan isn’t in some way uniquely bad for ‘western’ law systems. Indeed, conviction rate is a really hard stat to do any sort of apples to apples comparison for because different countries count and report it different ways.
Apparently it’s the former. Their prosecution rate is 8% apparently according to Wikipedia, because they’re too understaffed to deal with cases that can go either way. They also have a false confession problem, but that’s not what’s getting them to that rate.
They have (or had) a suspiciously high confession rate too.
