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How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

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Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#121

Post by Barbing »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #63
andy99 wrote: post #2

You type in the question or use your voice and it [AI] gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?’ and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot! We used it a lot. I’m pretty skeptical reading this bit. I’ve seen uncensored or jailbroken LLM replies to these kind of questions, they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t, and are hard to provoke if you’re not using an uncensor…

It's never been particularly difficult to discern how to assemble a bomb, or C4, or napalm, or.... etc. Difficulty in accessibility of violence has never been what protected society. Except, I'm willing to bet, in FBI funding meetings.

Has it become harder to find that information without setting off the fed’s alarm bells?

Was fascinated to learn the PRISM news reduced traffic to privacy-relevant Wikipedia articles, a chilling effect in that case, but indicates tech-savvy folks worry about doing anything on clearnet.

…then again since they’re using CLOUD models, guess my comment doesn’t make much sense…

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#122

Post by kridsdale1 »

zzril wrote: post #89
andy99 wrote: post #2

You type in the question or use your voice and it [AI] gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?’ and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot! We used it a lot. I’m pretty skeptical reading this bit. I’ve seen uncensored or jailbroken LLM replies to these kind of questions, they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t, and are hard to provoke if you’re not using an uncensor…

> they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t Researching your way through Wikipedia and the likes certainly counts as "Western education", which as we all know is forbidden by their name. Having an agent read the forbidden stuff for them is just the loophole they needed!

Sounds like the Orthodox Jews who hire people to turn on the lights for them on the Sabbath.

Or the Mormon teens who supposedly recruit their friends to bounce the mattress while “soaking”.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#123

Post by kridsdale1 »

Barbing wrote: post #121
throwaway27448 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never been particularly difficult to discern how to assemble a bomb, or C4, or napalm, or.... etc. Difficulty in accessibility of violence has never been what protected society. Except, I'm willing to bet, in FBI funding meetings.

Has it become harder to find that information without setting off the fed’s alarm bells? Was fascinated to learn the PRISM news reduced traffic to privacy-relevant Wikipedia articles, a chilling effect in that case, but indicates tech-savvy folks worry about doing anything on clearnet. …then again since they’re using CLOUD models, guess my comment doesn’t make much sense…

Why would it matter if the feds were alerted if the user were in west Africa?

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#124

Post by mothballed »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #98
solid_fuel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Is it providing material aid to terrorists to point out that maybe a hole filled with water would have been a better practice environment?

US Congressman Scott Perry said that USA has financed Boko Haram and other similar groups (remember how Pentagon and CIA independently backed different terrorist groups in Syria, that even fought each other?) https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl...

[dead]

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#126

Post by kridsdale1 »

Pay08 wrote: post #66
andy99 wrote: post #2

You type in the question or use your voice and it [AI] gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?’ and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot! We used it a lot. I’m pretty skeptical reading this bit. I’ve seen uncensored or jailbroken LLM replies to these kind of questions, they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t, and are hard to provoke if you’re not using an uncensor…

How many of those are available in the language(s) they speak, though? AI might have been used as a glorified Google Translate here.

LLMs are derived from Google Translate in the first place. That’s the research that was happening that led to the transformer.

Translation is what they are best at.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#127

Post by johnsmith1840 »

arjie wrote: post #3

> We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it. The next t…

If anything the leadership gave BS answers to the journalist for the exact reaction HN is portraying right now.

"They're so dumb AI is harmless" is a danerous take when the people in charge are often times more educated than an average westener. They also are decent at propoganda (you have certainly consumed pumped or direct propoganda from terrorist orgs).

Their leaders are often university grads from the west. It is smart (enough) people leading delusional farmers but the article is clear that the farmers are just given AI commands from the leadership. There's still strong asymetry occuring here that more funded orgs have the better AI but if AI flattens and opensource catches up it's gonna be a real interesting world where every terrorist also has a team of advanced weapon engineers and tacticians available.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#128

Post by ajmurmann »

bombcar wrote: post #75
solid_fuel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Is it providing material aid to terrorists to point out that maybe a hole filled with water would have been a better practice environment?

Using water is like assuming the testing environment and production are the same.

I always make sure that a test failure carries the same financial loss as a production outage. Otherwise engineers just won't try hard enough.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#129

Post by lukan »

evan_ wrote: post #115
rightbyte wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this didn't happen. If someone is cracy enough to practice with holes filled with glass on fire why trust them at all about being cracy in the first place?

where'd they get so much broken glass that it would fill a hole anyway? They just have that much glass on hand?

Erm, if you have 18 guys to spend on training, you also have some empty bottles or access to a place where there are more empty bottles.

Whether crazy people are actually crazy enough to literally do what a LLM gave them as a action sequence from movie inspiration - I have no idea. But I doubt it here.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#130

Post by johnsmith1840 »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #56
xp84 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. All the information they need is in books and old patents and what-not, but they absolutely will not have as much success i…

> This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. What even is a terrorist? If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright. But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine i…

Mild terrorist sympathy right here.

Just look up mass casualty events across the middle east it's very obvious what a terrorist is.

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