The First 30 Months of Psychological Manipulation of Humans by AI
Black Hat USA 2025 · Day 1 · Briefings
Nearly every prediction made by this research team at Black Hat USA 2023 about AI-enabled psychological manipulation came true — faster than anticipated. In the 30 months since, LLMs have been demonstrated to be more persuasive than humans at scale, digital twins have proliferated as both commercial products and attack tools, and Grok 4 will now readily assist with large-scale misinformation planning that four years ago required a purpose-built jailbroken model. The researchers introduce the concept of "whaling as the new phishing" — hyper-targeted manipulation campaigns run against human digital twins thousands of times to identify optimal attack vectors before engaging a real target. ---
AI review
Buchanan has earned the right to give a talk like this — the 2023 prediction scorecard is legitimate and the whaling-via-digital-twin concept is operationally concrete. But this sits at the uncomfortable border between threat intelligence lecture and TED-style futurism, and the Grok 4 misinformation planning demonstration is more alarming as an anecdote than as analysis.