In this episode of Show & Tell, researcher Hal Triedman showed us how easy it can be to poison an AI research agent.
Hosts Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis talked with Hal, a computer science PhD student at Cornell Tech and former senior privacy engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, about his preprint “Deep-Research Agents Can Be Poisoned via User-Generated Content.”
Hal walked us through his findings that demonstrated how you can trick AI research agents into citing fake products just by appending short text to Reddit pages. Hal also shared several free resources that can help you investigate Wikipedia.
What You’ll Learn: 📍 How AI research agents can be "poisoned": Adding a sentence or two to a Reddit page that Google or OpenAI deem relevant for a query can cause research agents to cite products, apps, and investments that don't exist. 📍What this means for AI search manipulation: At roughly two cents per run, a deceptive actor can test thousands of queries for a couple hundred dollars, with success rates of 20–40% on topics where UGC sites feature prominently on Google. 📍How to find stories on Wikipedia: Where to find pageviews for Wikipedia pages over time as well as how to follow discussions among Wikipedians about how to handle certain topics and controversies.
About Hal Triedman: Hal is a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell Tech, working with Vitaly Shmatikov’s lab on privacy, security, and AI. Prior to that, he worked as a Senior Privacy Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation.
About Show & Tell Show & Tell from Indicator takes you inside digital investigations as leading journalists, OSINT investigators, threat analysts, and researchers walk through real cases they've cracked. Each episode features a recognized figure in the digital investigations community. They don't just tell us what they did — they show us.
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