Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Media Data

Generative, multimodal artificial intelligence(GenAI) offers transformative potential across industries, but its misuse poses significant risks. While prior research has shed light on the potential of advanced AI systems to be exploited for malicious purposes, we still lack a concrete under-standing of how GenAI models are specifically exploited or abused in practice, including the tac-tics employed to inflict harm. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of GenAI misuse tactics, in-formed by existing academic literature and a qualitative analysis of approximately 200 observed incidents of misuse reported between January 2023and March 2024. Through this analysis, we illuminate key and novel patterns in misuse during this time period, including potential motivations, strategies, and how attackers leverage and abuse system capabilities across modalities (e.g. image, text, audio, video) in the wild. Notably, we find that manipulation of human likeness (i.e., impersonation and sockpuppeting) and falsification of evidence underlie the most common tactics used in real-world cases of misuse.We further show that the majority of reported misuse cases leverage easily accessible GenAI capabilities that require minimal technical expertise, rather than relying on complex attacks or advanced system manipulation.