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How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

casp.ac

151–160 of 224 posts

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#151
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…

Honestly this sounds so outlandish that it makes me skeptical of the whole thing. They didn't stop after the first guy died? Or the tenth? Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next? And where's the video? Terrorist groups love propaganda footage, if they were doing motorcycle stunts like Evel Knievel they'd be bragging about it everywhere.

Bokom Haram regularly kidnaps children. The girls become “wives”. The boys become the next generation of soldier.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#152
post #41
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...

There are a lot of very smart people joining cults, including people who just wanted to study them and were fully aware that what they believed in was nonsense. Terrorist groups are cults.

Just because you consider yourself smart because you have a PhD, high IQ, built a successful company or practice some intellectual activity and are good at it doesn't mean you are immune to the manipulation tactics used by cults. Once sufficiently brainwashed, your judgment will get clouded, but it doesn't mean you will lose your technical skills, which you will put to the service of the cult.

Think about Nazi Germany. Germans weren't idiots, the simple fact that most of the world had to turn against them to defeat them is proof enough. But they still managed to get manipulated into committing the worst crimes.

The reason it worked is not stupidity, it is misery. They were at their lowest following WW1, and Hitler promised them better. Same idea for terrorist groups and other cults, people who are experiencing hardships are the easiest to indoctrinate, and there is no shortage of such people in Nigeria.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#153

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?

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

I wouldn't think the glass and fire would do them a lot of good either.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#154
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?

You need Jean Claude for that.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> Steal

It's competition, buddy. If you don't think we got big the same way you're nuts. And anyone who is trying to kill tesla has my money.

Anyway, I don't think there's much worth stealing at the moment. Chinese models provide much better value than any american firm.

> but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.

A) good luck trying to prevent access to a service and b) this is obvious cope. Of course the chinese can compete; there's no american magic beyond "having loads of money and nearby universities", which china has too.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#156
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?

These safeties in AI are out of control. Who knows where we would be if they were using heretic models.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#157
post #156

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?

These safeties in AI are out of control. Who knows where we would be if they were using heretic models.

I would pay premium coin for a slaanesh AI model

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> Steal It's competition, buddy. If you don't think we got big the same way you're nuts. And anyone who is trying to kill tesla has my money. Anyway, I don't think there's much worth stealing at the moment. Chinese models provide much better value than any american firm. > but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply. A) good luck trying to prevent access to a service and b) this is obvious cope. Of…

Anthropic/OpenAI should have full control over who accesses their service since it's basically an API they provide.

Chinese models are great, nobody says otherwise but many of the publicly available ones are distilled and not trained from scratch.

Adding KYC would crack down on distilling because they use thousands of burner accounts to do it and now those accounts would need a face to verify.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#160
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…

Those 8 that survived clearly gained an edge by putting glue on their pizza.
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