Monika Stewart
Monika is a data and AI consultant in the Netherlands, with around 10 years across data quality, machine learning and engineering. Her current focus is AI safety and governance, including the EU AI Act, agentic AI risk and prompt injection.
On her blog ai.stewart.wtf she write about AI news and concerns about AI for business audiences, while keeping it grounded in science. You may have seen her as a visitor at the last EMF, WHY2025 or 39C3.
Session
Social engineers aim at one target: a human whose judgement has gone offline. They pull known levers, like authority, liking and urgency, to make their target compliant. Generative AI frequently pulls the same levers, whether by design or accident, while slowly eroding the very skills we would use to protect ourselves. Coming at this from an odd mix of social engineering, a year of psychology, some basic knowledge of tradecraft, and the AI work I do now, I will lay out the eerie overlap between long-game social engineering and everyday LLM use, the research on how it erodes human skill and what it does to our judgement. While cyber security’s usual defences were built for louder, one-shot attacks, tradecraft may have some useful techniques that could apply here.