Risks of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-assisted scams on online sharing-economy platforms

The prevalence of scams proliferating via online platforms has been identified as an emerging societal problem resulting in large-scale financial losses for victims. Online scams typically rely for their success on the generation of fake but convincing user profiles to conceal the identities of the scammers from the people being tricked into parting with their money. The increasing sophistication of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), which can produce outputs indistinguishable from real content, thus carries the risk of being adopted by fraudsters to assist in the enactment of online scams. This article considers the risks of the potential uptake and use of GenAI applications by online scammers operating in the sharing economy, with a focus on homestay-marketplace platforms and, in particular, the largest such platform, Airbnb.