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Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

blog.openai.com

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Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#161

Post by yesenadam »

kypro wrote: post #35
Mizza wrote: 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…

>a lot of people will say to this, "if you don't do anything wrong you've got nothing to hide"

That kind of assumes legally OK is everywhere and always the same as ethical, morally OK. Which is I guess easy to do, until life teaches you personally that there's a wide gulf between the two.

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." - Abbie Hoffman

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#162

Post by shkkmo »

3pt14159 wrote: post #103

Reading the comments on this article make me realize how unserious most engineers and software developers are taking this. These threats are real. The weaponization of everything is actually happening. Since I wrote about it a month ago (Self-Crashing Cars) a number of people have reached out including people with actual insight into the military aspect of it. Militaries around the world are getting ready for true AI…

> We need to assemble all the work / treaties / regulations / research we put into securing nukes into securing AI / robotics and for the identical reasons.

I disagree. I think we need a fundamentally different approach to AI than to nuclear weapons. The proliferation of nuclear weapons were controllable because the components needed to develop a nuclear weapon included specialized, controllable physical goods and fairly recognizable industrial installations.

I do agree that we need international treaties prohibiting the development and use of AI weapons technology to avoid encouraging an arms race.

However, I think that trying to prevent the spread of AI tools and technology will face similar problems to the US's attempts to prevent the spread of encryption tools and technology. It is fundamentally harder to control the spread of information that the spread of physical goods.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#163

Post by Eridrus »

Avamander wrote: post #144
Eridrus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Nothing bad so far... For example there's a lot of homophobic people out in the world, right? Now let's assume this article, https://osf.io/zn79k/ , is correct in it's conclusions and boom, you've got machines that could potentially discriminate based on the CCTV footage of the building you entered for a job interview. This is just the start, scientists are heavily looking for those genes that make people smart, more…

So far every single reply to my comment was about how things could go bad, without anything currently bad.

In the presence of all the tracking that people rail against, there are so few actual harms that everyone invents an issue.

I think this is telling.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#164

Post by shkkmo »

tree_of_item wrote: post #71
edanm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A super-virus that has a 100% mortality rate, is incredibly infectious, and stays dormant for 1 year before killing the host. There's a fiction (I literally just made it up). Is it impossible to say anything about it? A bomb that is 1,000 times for powerful than a nuclear weapon. Again, currently science fiction. Can't say anything about that either? The fact that it doesn't exist right now doesn't mean we can't say…

A "superintelligent" AI that is to a human as a human is to a fly. Is it impossible to say anything about the world after it's been built ? Yes . It's not the fact that it doesn't exist, it's the fact that not only is it not clear that it's even physically possible, anything you come up with can just be handwaved away by this mystical property known as "intelligence". Your two examples don't have this problem so they…

The problem may not have been your point (that we can't reason about strong AI), but the way you justified it.

Strong AI is not hard to reason about because it is science fiction. As edanm pointed out, it is entirely possible to reason about science fiction. The difference is that the examples edanm points out are extensions or modifications of things that do exist and that provides a basis from which we can reasonably extrapolate.

We can't reason about strong AI precisely because we don't have as good of an existing example from which we can extrapolate. The best we have is the human mind. The extrapolation from the human mind is precisely the basis for argument that "friendly strong AI" is the best/only response to to "malicious strong AI" since the thing that keeps malicious humans in check is "good" humans.

We don't even know if or to what degree 'super-intelligence' is possible. For all we know, there may be fundamental trade offs between the different skills necessary for general intelligence that may provide functional limits to the degree to which intelligence can be super human.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#165

Post by chrisvalleybay »

Diederich wrote: post #123
kypro wrote: 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…

> ... 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…

One huge difference is that information to a large degree would stay within these communities. Gossip was inherently limited by the bandwidth of the jungle telegraph. What's scary now, however, is anyone can publish any information about you, tag it to your face, and now everyone walking past you could theoretically face-search you to see any gossip about you. Before you could travel someplace else, should you do something that required it. Now you can't go anywhere.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#166

Post by shkkmo »

taneq wrote: post #108
tree_of_item wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "superintelligent" AI that is to a human as a human is to a fly. Is it impossible to say anything about the world after it's been built ? Yes . It's not the fact that it doesn't exist, it's the fact that not only is it not clear that it's even physically possible, anything you come up with can just be handwaved away by this mystical property known as "intelligence". Your two examples don't have this problem so they…

> Is it impossible to say anything about the world after it's been built? Well, actually no. It's possible to say one thing (and as far as I'm aware, only this thing): You'd better have an even smarter friendly AI on your side, or you're almost certainly boned.

> You'd better have an even smarter friendly AI on your side, or you're almost certainly boned.

Are you sure? Was the world better off with both the US and Russia having nukes? Perhaps, or perhaps we got incredibly lucky that we didn't destroy ourselves. It is quite possible that a world where we have a single malicious AI is better than a world where a malicious AI and a friendly AI are locked in a battle to the death.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#167

Post by cf »

r3bl wrote: post #67
cf wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people care about this. I think the solution is to produce policy papers about this risk complete with proposals for how to go about curtailing those kinds of abuses. The EU still cares a lot about privacy, and other government bodies are happy to help if you can suggest how.

> ...and other government bodies are happy to help if you can suggest how. Ah, you mean like the US punishing the company that leaked one out of every two social security numbers of its citizens? Or China, a country worldly-known for the Great Firewall? Or Russia, in which you either hand out data about your customers to the government, or your business fails? I mean, the EU's actually giving a shit about their citiz…

You have to be strategic if your country doesn't care, but the first step is to create the intellectual edifice activists in the future will lean against. Also even as someone not in your country, I would still enjoy reading any writing on this.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#168

Post by ynniv »

gone35 wrote: post #124
ynniv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appar…

The problem is that we don’t know whether our encryption is vulnerable to advanced attacks. Cryptographic hash functions actually have a useful lifespan based on the math and the cost of computing. The more time we spend analyzing the math, the more likely we are to find unexpected weaknesses.

http://valerieaurora.org/hash.html

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#169

Post by anfilt »

tudelo wrote: post #117
tree_of_item wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for point 2, if someone is more worthy... why is that bad? Someone is "more worthy" according to an opaque machine learning algorithm. Your line is exactly the danger: people are going to confuse "the computer says X" with "X is true".

I agree that it could be frustrating, and maybe someone will not make that distinction. But either way, these are decisions that have to be made. What is your alternative to how the decisions are made? In the end, you are either leaving it to a human decision who is going to make a choice based on some heuristics and prejudice or an algorithm which is going to make a choice based on heuristics and prejudice. I'm not…

However, there is a differnce. If I dont get a job offer becuase I dont fit a humans biases of what they want. I can go somewhere else with a human that has differnt biases. The problem is with AI is how many googles are there? We will liekly end up with a handful of companies that rate you. Suddenly it does not matter where you apply for a job. If you did one thing that ruins/lowers these ratings you may not get a job. The problem is only a handful of entities decide what good is. If everyone is using these systems and you fail to meet their definition of good person/hire you like may suddenly become difficult.

Where as before people would have decide that themselves even if its a shallow cursory judgement. At least people are makeing their own decisions instead of blindy following a number/evaluation with criteria they do not know.

Re: Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI

#170

Post by bitL »

shostack wrote: post #140
PoachedSausage wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is simply turning off your device while there a solution? Asking as someone who may travel to the UK and EU this year.

No, there are stealth SMS messages and your baseband processor is receiving/answering them even when phone is off but battery is inside.

https://github.com/CellularPrivacy/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Dete...

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