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Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

blog.openai.com

121–130 of 233 posts

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#121
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Martin Shkreli wasn't targeted by the government for prosecution. Shkreli got the max sentence for a crime he committed because he was out spoken about how he was not remorseful his crimes, nor did he show any capacity to even understand the seriousness of his actions. He also encouraged others to commit crimes for him during his sentencing. Judicial discretion isn't always perfect, but enforcing the max on an obviou…

I'm not arguing this. My point is simply that they wouldn't have gone after him if he didn't surrounded himself in controversy. What he did happens all the time, but unlike many others his outspokenness exposed the corruption and greed which occurs daily in our economic system.

I think that really only becomes an issue in countries where there are laws passed that contradict each other and to get anything meaningful done you have to break laws and/or give bribes. At any time someone can come after you because you had to break some laws in the course of everyday business whether you wanted to or not.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

already accept it's happening and inevitable I've almost given up. I'm pretty much despondent at this point. There is a booth on my way to work where they give out free Lays chips in exchange for your photo. The gimmick is that it's like a photo booth. I asked the attendant to read the privacy policy, and it's frightening, to say the least. I have no doubt that they are contracting with some AI consultant to be able…

Have you ever stood in line for passport/ID control at an airport or anywhere else any time in the past decade? If yes, that government's security and intelligence services (and anyone they share data with) have enough video frames of your your face to build a high fidelity facial recognition model. And it's linked to your name, nationality and passport number.

That’s bad, but it’s not to exploit influence over you for profit.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#123
post #35
post #30

The disturbing thing about this paper to me - flashy though it may be - is what they left out rather than what they kept in. OpenAI appears to only be thinking of the crimes-against-individuals segment of malicious AI, rather then the crimes-against-humanity type of malicious AI that the surveillance advertising corporations who are supporting OpenAI are building. I am far, far less worried about an assassin's drones…

> I'm more concerned about Google using AI to mine every conversation I've ever had or my browsing history to classify me as a dissiden before I apply for a visa to travel to China or the United States, or as a deadbeat before I apply for a bank loan, or sick before I apply for insurance, or as unrehabilitatable before I apply for parole. I'm quite paranoid about this, yet whenever I speak to people about it either p…

> ... feel we've lost the battle for privacy.

I agree with pretty much all of the concerns you and many others have cited, and I worry about that stuff too. On the other hand, I think about the past. How much privacy did most humans have in history?

To be clear: I'm nothing like an expert on these topics.

I'm specifically not considering the wandering nomad types. I think that the vast majority of all humans who have existed lived in fairly insular communities.

So you're a member of a small town where most adults and kids work in agriculture in order to survive. The building you live in is crowded, and not just with immediate family. You sleep in the same room as a number of other people.

What privacy do you have? Cross talk/gossip moves very quickly and is pervasive. I believe if any member of this community does anything out of the norm, every member will very quickly find out about it.

I also think that most any deviance from the norm was met with, at best, suspicion.

Are you free to leave and do your own thing? Sure, but isn't that quite risky? Maybe you could join another community...maybe. But the privacy situation remains the same.

Excluding the romantic but minority cases of hearty frontier settler, and the like, I don't think humans have enjoyed much privacy at all, ever.

I'll say it again: I'm an amateur at best in these topics.

Isn't it basic human nature to, on average, form gossipy, minimally private communities?

I'm not forgetting the enormous differences between what I just described, whether it be accurate or not, and what's happening today with technology.

I'm just thinking that, perhaps, only a small percentage of all humans in history have enjoyed anything like real privacy.

PS: I'd love to receive clarifications/corrections on this from more knowledgeable folk.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#124
post #78
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm more concerned about Google using AI to mine every conversation I've ever had or my browsing history to classify me as a dissiden before I apply for a visa to travel to China or the United States, or as a deadbeat before I apply for a bank loan, or sick before I apply for insurance, or as unrehabilitatable before I apply for parole. I'm quite paranoid about this, yet whenever I speak to people about it either p…

The "best" part is how good an AI would be at privilege escalation. Go ahead, build out that security camera network, automate your cars, store your money using cryptography. I'm a geek and I love the way technology increases our collective prosperity, but most of our security relies on the attackers being approximately as smart as any other human. To a sufficiently capable intelligence, encrypted machine code is jus…

To a sufficiently capable intelligence, encrypted machine code is just as understandable as the most elegant source code.

Depends on what you mean by "sufficiently" and "encrypted"!

I'm not an expert, but my guess is these are still truly difficult, deep unsolved questions... We don't even know yet if one-way functions exist; and existing modes of analysis increasingly seem insufficient to fully account for the apparent recent successes of this last wave of 'AI' on ostensibly non-convex optimization problems! (Not to mention the debates about the possibility of fundamental physical/computational complexity limits to intelligence explosion, and so forth...)

So who knows at this point; but I think it is still an open question whether a future AI could reasonably 'break' even today's commodity encryption.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#125
post #35
post #30

The disturbing thing about this paper to me - flashy though it may be - is what they left out rather than what they kept in. OpenAI appears to only be thinking of the crimes-against-individuals segment of malicious AI, rather then the crimes-against-humanity type of malicious AI that the surveillance advertising corporations who are supporting OpenAI are building. I am far, far less worried about an assassin's drones…

> I'm more concerned about Google using AI to mine every conversation I've ever had or my browsing history to classify me as a dissiden before I apply for a visa to travel to China or the United States, or as a deadbeat before I apply for a bank loan, or sick before I apply for insurance, or as unrehabilitatable before I apply for parole. I'm quite paranoid about this, yet whenever I speak to people about it either p…

>In fact, a lot of people will say to this, "if you don't do anything wrong you've got nothing to hide". They welcome it.

The usual rebuttal I see to this mindset is "well, there's so many laws out there you're bound to accidentally incriminate yourself for something minor".

Is that the real concern here? Are people more concerned with autonomous monitoring itself, or the potential outcomes/implications that come with it? I'd love to understand this mindset. (As an aside, I've always advocated for modernizing/reforming laws so that doesn't happen, instead of blaming news tools that help law enforcement do its job.)

I think we can agree there is some amount of potential benefit of this kind of pervasive monitoring (right?). I also think we can all agree there are potential downsides as well. In an ideal world, I would think we'd take an approach that minimizes the downsides while maximizing the upsides, but if people are actually taking concern with the loss of privacy to autonomous programming (i.e. non-humans), I have no idea how to measure how "good" such a system is.

(As an additional aside, there's obviously potential for misuse by human actors, but that seems like a separate issue to tackle as well: everything has potential for misuse, and needs the proper precautions and safeguards put in place to ensure it isn't misused.)

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#126
post #51
post #12

It may be superfluous to point this out but this seems to be talking about malicious uses of narrow AI, rather than malicious strong AI. The only defense against a malicious strong AI is, of course, a friendly strong AI.

A JDAM through it's power supply would be an effective defense against a malicious strong AI.

Lions and Bears : Humans aren't a threat. Sharp teeth through the neck are an effective defense against a malicious human.

If the hypothetical malicious AI gets built, your JDAMs will be about as advanced by comparison as a pointy stick against an M-16.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#127
post #81
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm more concerned about Google using AI to mine every conversation I've ever had or my browsing history to classify me as a dissiden before I apply for a visa to travel to China or the United States, or as a deadbeat before I apply for a bank loan, or sick before I apply for insurance, or as unrehabilitatable before I apply for parole. I'm quite paranoid about this, yet whenever I speak to people about it either p…

> I'm quite paranoid about this, yet whenever I speak to people about it either people don't care, or already accept it's happening and inevitable. I have yet to see much in the way of concrete harms from the supposed privacy issues plaguing online advertising. Everyone has a favorite hypothetical situation where Google dobs you in to the Chinese government, but no evidence that anything of the sort is actually happe…

> I have yet to see much in the way of concrete harms from the supposed privacy issues plaguing online advertising.

I haven't heard of nation-state level repercussions but the persistent profiling has already bitten a few people in the ass, such as the case where Target's profiling of a teenaged girl and their subsequent marketing betrayed her pregnancy status to her parents.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#128
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t really need the huge overhead of a block chain for that. You just need a hash and some redundant storage.

And to trust the guy who is storing the hash?

You could always put the hash on the blockchain. :)

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#129
post #30

The disturbing thing about this paper to me - flashy though it may be - is what they left out rather than what they kept in. OpenAI appears to only be thinking of the crimes-against-individuals segment of malicious AI, rather then the crimes-against-humanity type of malicious AI that the surveillance advertising corporations who are supporting OpenAI are building. I am far, far less worried about an assassin's drones…

I am far, far less worried about an assassin's drones using AI to find a politician in a crowd than I am about Facebook using pictures of me that other people have posted and tagged me in, so that my face is used to track my movements, and the movements of every other human on the planet, everywhere we go, and selling that information to everybody who wants a copy, and giving it away at the request of the local police.

Definitely not a lawyer but, as I understand it, depending on jurisdiction and context, some social media postings may be considered "public" information volunteered without "reasonable expectation of privacy" ---in which case, awfully enough, anything goes...

Again, not a lawyer; but I wonder if there should be a right to clear-language, mandatory warnings ---like in cigarrettes--- whenever you are about to post something that will not enjoy "reasonable expectation of privacy" (and hence could be sold or used against you in the future, etc.)..

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

already accept it's happening and inevitable I've almost given up. I'm pretty much despondent at this point. There is a booth on my way to work where they give out free Lays chips in exchange for your photo. The gimmick is that it's like a photo booth. I asked the attendant to read the privacy policy, and it's frightening, to say the least. I have no doubt that they are contracting with some AI consultant to be able…

Have you ever stood in line for passport/ID control at an airport or anywhere else any time in the past decade? If yes, that government's security and intelligence services (and anyone they share data with) have enough video frames of your your face to build a high fidelity facial recognition model. And it's linked to your name, nationality and passport number.

I recently noticed when coming back through UK passport/ID control that there are now boxes hanging from the ceiling in the waiting area, I assume to scoop up IMSI's/Wifi/Bluetooth/NFC MAC addresses from phones and tablets. All tied to passport/facial biometrics presumably.
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