UTA Researcher Explores Vulnerabilities of AI Systems to Online Misinformation

Shirin Nilizadeh, PhD

Shirin Nilizadeh, PhD, a University of Texas at Arlington researcher is working to increase the security of natural language generation (NLG) systems, such as those used by ChatGPT, to guard against misuse and abuse that could allow the spread of misinformation online.

“These systems have complex architectures and are designed to learn from whatever information is on the internet. An adversary might try to poison these systems with a collection of adversarial or false information,” Nilizadeh said.

Nilizadeh’s research will include a comprehensive look at the types of attacks that NLG systems are susceptible to and the creation of AI-based optimization methods to examine the systems against different attack models. She also will explore an in-depth analysis and characterization of vulnerabilities that lead to attacks and develop defensive methods to protect NLG systems.