Document Type

Report

Publication Date

8-29-2025

Abstract

The success of terrorist and extremist organizations is dependent on their ability to be creative and innovative (e.g., Gill et al., 2013; Ligon et al., 2018; Logan et al., 2020). That is, these organizations are inherently focused on causing harm to their targets in ways that are novel, thus undetectable from threat assessment efforts. Homeland Security Enterprise can establish novel countermeasures to mitigate threats by engaging in the same creative problem-solving process as the terrorist and extremist organizations (e.g., d’Amato & Hunter, 2023). One way to do this is by using the same tools nefarious actors engage with for idea generation. Generative AI is the newest form of technology being used to aid the development and execution of attacks by enhancing the malevolent creativity process (d’Amato et al., 2025; Theobald et al., 2025), but it is paramount that the emerging technology is used optimally. This document serves as a guide to prompt engineer idea generation to simulate malevolent use cases with controlled, ethical prompt engineering to help operational teams better understand what threats generative AI might enable, accelerating threat identification and/or assessment.

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