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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

#141

Post by ryukoposting »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #122
zzril wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”.

In case it isn't obvious to anyone reading the parent comment: do not search for "soaking" on your work computer.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#142

Post by xp84 »

yorwba wrote: post #111
xp84 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about education itself necessarily, but I'd bet any amount of money that most terrorists' IQ is below the overall human average. The average terrorist is not that innovative or creative so the most mundane GPT "insight" will likely be a smarter course of action than whatever their first idea would have been.

If anything, the average terrorist is probably smarter than the average member of their surrounding societies, since you need a minimum amount of education to understand the ideology motivating the terrorism. Don't forget that Taliban literally means "students." The number of times someone tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan suggests that it's not an easy feat that any fool could have done, but the Taliban manage…

> Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none.

Embracing and believing this destructive ideology itself in the first place, when you could devote your life to so many better[1] things, is the sign of stupidity I mean.

Believing that God wants you to murder other people (heck, even babies) over things such as who's worshiping Him correctly... stupid.

1. Better for... you name it: Your quality of life, welfare of other human beings, economically, spiritually, environmentally.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#143

Post by antod »

Scroll_Swe wrote: post #125

[flagged]

Unless by "the left" you mean some solitary idiot (or troll) on tiktok who just went to college.

In the west Boko Haram's goal seem closer to groups on the right than anyone on "the left". eg suppressing women's rights, more religion in school/govt, homosexuality etc

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#144

Post by Animats »

dylan604 wrote: post #105
throw2ih020 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a real thing, it's why units like Sturmtruppen or special forces units have been successful throughout history - a smaller, better trained and coordinated force is often better than a large, uncoordinated mob. _Especially_ if your force is made up of people willing to do suicide attacks. Or if you goal is not to take and hold territory, but to trade lives for terror and body count. A wave of 1000 soldiers won…

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.

The books exist, but those books are read by few outside military leadership. The good ones come from leaders who have been there, and they skip over the basics. Being able to talk to a chatbot that can get people past the classic military mistakes could make a force far more effective. Maybe. It's not going to create a Giap or a Rommel, but it might keep a force from repeating classic military mistakes.

There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.

A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.

The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24842

[2] https://angrystaffofficer.com/

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#145

Post by misnome »

notahacker wrote: post #17
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…

Not gonna lie, I'd rather attack with 26 fighters that haven't survived lots of jump attempts than 8 who are much more confident in their motorbike stunt riding but presumably still aren't bulletproof. But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?

That's how you get Gun Kata

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#146

Post by xp84 »

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…

> "one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter"

yes, but only to weak-minded cultural relativists.

I don't mind stating a definition explicitly. If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.

Note: The only real complexity in the definition is that during war, embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes, and when it does, it's the ones choosing to do that, war criminals by definition, who bear the responsibility for those innocent deaths when those locations then become legitimate military targets.

I'll omit giving examples to avoid triggering those who like to "bothsides" some of the more well-known terrorist groups lately.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#147

Post by VortexLain »

Trying to prevent this will cause the same outcome as trying to prevent terrorists from using search engines: it'll only disproportionately harm regular users. Imagine if current AI misuse paranoia would've been applied to search engines, internet libraries (knowledge is useful for planning acts of terrorism), and computing in general.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#148

Post by johnsmith1840 »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #139
johnsmith1840 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As the largest AI scappers on the planet.. sure

They don't have nearly enough compute to be competitive on pretraining and distillation is exponentially cheaper.

It's literally the same tactic they do in every industry. Steal top IP, gov funding, ban the company they stole from domestically while driving cost to zero, try to kill the original IP creators.

They are actively in the process of doing this with Tesla as we speak. And are in the phase of pushing them out domestically and trying to destroy tesla marketshare globally.

They have obvious skills and add a lot of value while doing this but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#149

Post by throwup238 »

solid_fuel wrote: post #53
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…

> 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?

The water damage would ruin the motorcycles. They can always get more jumpers. The hard part is motivating them!
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