Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington have shown how artificial intelligence can analyze public Instagram posts and use them to write phishing emails, Fox News reported. The outlet's summary describes the messages as spear phishing emails and says they "feel personal" to the people who receive them.
According to Fox News, the AI system studies the posts that users share publicly on Instagram and draws on that material to build each message. The summary does not say how many accounts or posts the researchers examined, which AI systems they used, or how often the emails succeeded in deceiving recipients.
The Fox News account of the research is limited to a short summary. It does not include comments from the researchers or any response from Instagram or its parent company. The headline of the Fox News piece frames the findings as a way that a person's own social media activity can be turned against them, but the summary does not elaborate on that framing.
The summary also gives no date or location for the research beyond what Fox News has published, and it does not describe any steps that researchers recommended or that the platform took in response.
Sources: Fox News: AI phishing scams turn your social posts against you.