Black Hat USA 2025 | The First 30 Months of Psychological Manipulation of Humans by AI

An exploration of how large language models and human digital twins are being deployed to exploit human cognitive vulnerabilities and social norms.

In our highly rated 2023 talk "Evil Digital Twin", we warned that large language models (LLMs) were exploiting the cognitive vulnerabilities of their users, and that humans would perceive AI as sentient long before true artificial general intelligence emerges. Twenty four months later, the situation has escalated rapidly, and many of our predictions have become realities, rewriting our civilization's core realities. Join us for a two year check-in, as we discuss how human digital twins (HDTs) trained on the core patterns of human individuals are being deployed at scale to simulate everything from human i workflows to relationships. Cyberattack stakeholders have taken notice of the capabilities of LLMs in exploiting human social norms, cognitive bias, and perceptual limitations. We will detail a present where longitudinal interaction data is facilitating low-cost social engineering labor and high power AI-human hybrid attacks. We will also explore a coming future of persistent cognitive cyberwarfare, escalating as the cost of deception approaches zero, and the attack surface shifts from networks to minds. Audience members will interact with a human digital twin of a Supreme Court justice, meet a perfect AI assistant for insider threat, and leave with a NIST research-based LLM that speaks in phishing emails. Get a sneak peek at research in collaboration with the US Military Academy (USMA) at Westpoint that pits humans and human digital twins against one another in competitions of manipulation and deception. We will finally talk about a brighter future that is still attainable, where AI natives, those that have grown up in a context suffused by AI, can help us to build defensive posture that extends beyond infrastructure to include cognitive security, protecting not just digital systems, but the systems that underpin civilization and the human beings they serve. By: Ben D. Sawyer | Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering, University of Central Florida Matthew Canham | Executive Director, Cognitive Security Institute Presentation Materials Available at: blackhat.com/us-25/briefings/schedule/?#evil-digital-twin-to…