Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

casp.ac

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 224 posts

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#131

Post by johnsmith1840 »

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.

Language -> any translator -> LLM -> translator -> original language

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#132

Post by johnsmith1840 »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #73
hoppp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the impact of AI is comparable to the atomic bomb then the least they could do is try to filter out terrorists. I think this is a very convincing argument to regulate the space more.

...because terrorists in western africa are willing to follow american regulations? I hope this is satire.

American AI labs -> industrial chinese scaping -> opensource LLM -> boko haram

It's a supply chain the US actually can easily control with KYC.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#133

Post by mothballed »

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…

99.99% of the people consuming that content are law abiding (relatively), "normal" citizens, including probably half of 13 year old boys. I'm sure the feds have access to the "list", but it is virtually useless until after the fact when they can tell the jury "and you see here, they looked it up!"

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#134

Post by Ancapistani »

IsTom wrote: post #80
27183 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well? Practice makes perfect!

You start with .22 and build up resistance from there.

I'd suggest starting with a 2mm Kolibri, if you can find one.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#135

Post by dylan604 »

throw2ih020 wrote: post #119
dylan604 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the point of suspicion. Smaller vs larger group tactics have been available in pretty much any place you look. It's in movies. It's in games. It's in books. Like actual military strategy books studied by military students. This has been available for much longer than LLMs.

Boko Haram wouldn't have read any of those books because they banned the reading of any book except the Koran.

So they are okay reading the non-Koran text from the bot?

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#136

Post by Ancapistani »

BeetleB wrote: post #15
mothballed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making explosives is generally fully legal in the US, so IDK if there would even be safeguards for US hosted AI, since there's no real legal issue with doing it. Basically no federal regulations for non-commercial production so long as it isn't stored or moved anywhere, you can literally buy tannerite off the shelf in a sporting good store, "synthesize" it by mixing it and then blow up a huge bomb legally, no license…

Have you tried chatbots? They invoke AI safety for lots of (very) legal things. The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs. Legality has nothing to do with it.

I kept running into it when building an app that did ballistics calculation.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#137

Post by Ancapistani »

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…

> If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.

That's a great example of selection bias: if they were intelligent enough to be capable of causing harm at that scale, they would have immediately realized the new guy suggesting targets and offering to buy them explosives was an FBI agent.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#138

Post by antod »

xp84 wrote: post #41
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…

> 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…

>If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.

In my head I was running through a whole lot groups to replace "terrorists" with in that sentence...

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#139

Post by throwaway27448 »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #132
throwaway27448 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...because terrorists in western africa are willing to follow american regulations? I hope this is satire.

American AI labs -> industrial chinese scaping -> opensource LLM -> boko haram It's a supply chain the US actually can easily control with KYC.

I think the chinese are doing just fine by themselves at this point

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#140

Post by throw2ih020 »

dylan604 wrote: post #135
throw2ih020 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boko Haram wouldn't have read any of those books because they banned the reading of any book except the Koran.

So they are okay reading the non-Koran text from the bot?

Yup. If you're looking for intelligence or logical consistency, you won't find it here.
Post reply on HN