Of course AI-assisted hacking is here. What exactly did people think was going to happen?
Anything humans do that can be amplified by artificial intelligence will be amplified by it. Every profession. Every trade. Every obsession. Every vice. Every virtue. The moment a tool exists that enhances pattern recognition, accelerates research, automates repetitive tasks, and lowers the technical threshold for execution, humans will inevitably apply it everywhere from medicine to fraud, from engineering to propaganda, from scientific discovery to digital burglary.
That is not shocking. It is inevitable.
AI itself is not some demonic entity lurking in silicon waiting to destroy civilization. It is a tool. A very powerful one, yes, but still a tool. And tools reflect the intentions of the hand wielding them.
A kitchen knife can produce a magnificent meal in the hands of a gifted chef. In the hands of a psychopath it produces headlines and police tape. Yet nobody blames the metallurgy of the blade itself. We instinctively understand that the object is morally inert. The moral dimension enters only once a human mind directs its use.
The same applies to AI.
So naturally hackers use it. Why wouldn’t they?
Cybercrime is fundamentally an information game: reconnaissance, pattern analysis, automation, vulnerability detection, social engineering, code generation, adaptive attacks. Those are precisely the domains where AI shines brightest. Of course malicious actors will use these systems to write better phishing campaigns, scan infrastructure faster, automate exploit generation, and impersonate humans more convincingly.
But the strange thing is that the countermove may prove even more powerful.
Because AI does not only empower attackers. It empowers everyone.
I learned PHP around the year 2000 almost by accident. At the time I worked as a translator in a startup environment where technical improvisation was part survival mechanism, part black magic ritual. I never became what anyone would call an accomplished software engineer. Frankly, my coding skills remained crude for decades. Functional enough to build ugly little internal tools for myself, but not elegant, not scalable, not professional-grade.
Little utility scripts.
Messy management pages.
Primitive databases held together with duct tape and optimism.
They worked, more or less, but they always remained underdeveloped because improving them demanded time I did not have and expertise I lacked. So like almost everybody else, I drifted toward commercial software ecosystems. Monthly subscriptions. Cloud services. SaaS platforms. Endless fragmentation. Endless dependence on other people’s infrastructure.
And endless snooping.
Every service wanted another subscription. Another login. Another data stream. Another little window into my habits, workflow, preferences, contacts, projects, timing, and routines. Modern software increasingly resembled digital feudalism. You never truly owned your tools anymore. You merely rented access to them while corporations quietly harvested behavioral exhaust in the background.
Then AI arrived.
And suddenly the barriers collapsed.
Not because AI magically turned me into a genius programmer overnight. That fantasy belongs to marketing departments. But because it radically lowered the friction between idea and execution. The distance between “I wish I had a tool that does this” and actually building that tool shrank from months to afternoons.
That changes everything.
Since using AI-assisted coding, I have built an entire ecosystem around my own work. Planning systems. Writing management. Research aggregation. Copy management. Internal publishing structures. Workflow automation. Personal dashboards. Integrated utilities tailored precisely to how I think and operate instead of forcing me to adapt myself to the logic of giant corporate platforms.
Crude at times? Certainly.
Elegant? Not always.
But mine.
And that matters more than people realize.
Yes, there is also a security aspect. Smaller, highly customized systems are often harder targets because they do not fit the standardized attack surfaces criminals train against. The monoculture of mass software is part of the problem. When everyone uses identical systems, vulnerabilities scale beautifully for attackers.
But independence was the bigger motivation.
I wanted fewer subscriptions.
Less dependence.
Less surveillance.
Less fragmentation.
I wanted tools working together as one coherent structure instead of twenty disconnected commercial products stitched together by APIs and marketing promises.
And AI made that possible in ways that would have been unrealistic for someone with my technical background only a few years ago.
This is what people consistently misunderstand about technological revolutions. They obsess over the visible dangers while ignoring the enormous empowerment happening quietly beneath the noise. Yes, criminals benefit. They always do. Criminals adopted telephones, automobiles, encryption, the internet, and mobile banking too. Humanity survives regardless because the productive uses ultimately dwarf the destructive ones.
The real danger is not the tool.
It never was.
The real danger is a civilization increasingly unwilling to cultivate wisdom, restraint, responsibility, and moral courage while simultaneously handing itself ever more powerful instruments. AI merely magnifies what already exists inside us.
And that is the uncomfortable part.
Because if AI seems frightening, perhaps what truly terrifies people is finally seeing humanity reflected back at itself with the volume turned all the way up.
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/12/ai-hacking-found-google-report