OpenAI's ChatGPT can spit out a poem or write a letter if you're at a loss for words. Or, given the right prompts, you can use it to write a convincing phishing email at unprecedented speed and scale.
Case in point, IBM researchers posted an internal study that details how they unleashed a ChatGPT-generated phishing email on a real healthcare company to see if it could fool people as effectively as a human-penned one. The human email won with a slightly higher click rate of 14 percent — but just barely, compared to ChatGPT's click rate of 11 percent. And crafting a carefully targeted phishing email took a human team around 16 hours, they wrote, while ChatGPT took just minutes — findings that ought to scare anybody with an email address.