“A core selling point of machine learning is discovery without understanding, which is why errors are particularly common in machine-learning-based science.” I could not resist the temptation to start this article with a quote by AI as Normal Technology – it captures the current state of AI-everything perfectly. Should investigators really trust black boxes running a set of non-deterministic algorithms and providing different results on every reroll? And can we still use such black boxes to automate routine operations? Let’s try to find out.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere – from phones that guess your next move to fridges that shop for you. It’s only natural to ask whether AI can help in a more serious domain: digital forensics, specifically password cracking. The idea sounds promising: use large language models (LLMs) to produce rules and templates for guessing highly probable password variants, prioritizing the most likely ones first. But in practice, things aren’t so straightforward.