PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Artif. Intell.
Sec. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Volume 8 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frai.2025.1616447
This article is part of the Research TopicDisinformation Countermeasures and Artificial IntelligenceView all 10 articles
The History of the Semantic Hacking Project and The Lessons it Teaches for Modern Cognitive Security
Provisionally accepted
Paul Thompson1*
Sean Guillory2- 1Dartmouth College, Hanover, United States
- 2MAD Warfare, Oregon, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The Semantic Hacking Project ran from 2001 to 2003. It focused on how information systems (and the human decisions shaped by them) could be exploited through attacks not on code or infrastructure, but on meaning. This work is relevant to contemporary cognitive security concerns in the face of today’s information space. The work provides insight into the key question of how people come to hold the beliefs which they do. The project anticipated many of today’s challenges (disinformation campaigns, social media manipulation, AI-generated narratives) not just in technical terms, but in philosophical and linguistic terms. At the heart of its concern was a simple but powerful question: What happens when you can manipulate the inputs to a person’s belief system without the person knowing it? This question has only grown more urgent in an era of generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and algorithmically amplified influence.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, Generative AI, Large language models, Counter measures, cognitive security
Received: 22 Apr 2025; Accepted: 29 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Thompson and Guillory. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Paul Thompson, Dartmouth College, Hanover, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.