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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

#161

Post by dylan604 »

Animats wrote: post #144
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.

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 br…

I guess they aren't reading Art of War either. Knowing one's enemy blah blah. People unwilling to learn from others are doomed to repeat other's failures. In some situations, there's a perverse pleasure in seeing them fail. Such a pleasure it'd be great if there was a really fun word to describe it...

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#162

Post by bigfatkitten »

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…

> they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.

This is demonstrably false.

ISIL’s explosives training material in particular is produced with great professionalism and is of extremely high quality.

Al Qaeda’s was a bit more hit an miss, some of it was mostly ideological propaganda and some of it was outstanding but it was otherwise well structured with clear learning outcomes and assessment activities.

Most of this material was produced well before AI was a thing.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#163

Post by johnsmith1840 »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #155
johnsmith1840 wrote: post #148

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…

It's... the opposite of competition?

A foreign government state sponsoring IP theft and manipulating markets for unfair competition.

Here's a 1:1 example if the USA did exactly the same thing.

1. CIA and Ford work together to steal mercedes IP 2. Gov gives money to Ford to build the same car half the price 3. Throw as many roadblocks at mercedes regulation wise as possible until it is not financially viable to sell in US anymore. 4. Sell the same car back to germany at half the cost they have it because mercedes isn't state sponsored 5. Crush mercedes who created the better car to begin with.

That's not only dishonest but actually harmful for innovation and economic growth. China has done this Sooooo many times it's absurd.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#164

Post by johnsmith1840 »

hoppp wrote: post #158
throwaway27448 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you think any model coming out of china is not containing as much stolen data as humanly possible from the actual innovators u crazy.

Using a chinese model is like watching pirated films. If you actually support the people who make the thing you love then you don't do that.

We then get hit with chinese sponsored propoganda of "the big labs stole artist images to begin with so they can't complain" and act like LLMs didn't create an entire new category of thing.

So much propaganda so many lies and dishonesty because at the end of the day China knows it's not innovative enough to compete. It hopes to hobble our abilities while they frantically steal to catch up.

But the truth is that if China ever gets a lead over US in any innovation they will instantly kill any openess. If chinese AI ever passes US it's likely you'll never touch that model ever.

Just like the russians they use our own culture against us and it's absurd people fall for it.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#165

Post by glaslong »

uniclaude wrote: post #74
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?

This comment will definitely get you on a list somewhere. Either the CIA or my favorite comments on hn, maybe both.

Is this a riddle where you happen to work for the CIA?

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#168

Post by ButlerianJihad »

block_dagger wrote: post #166
petilon wrote: post #86

"Boko Haram" translates to "Western education is forbidden". Using Western AI as an educational tool seems like hypocrisy.

Are you sure "education" doesn't actually mean "ideology"?

“Boko” is actually a loanword from “book” so it literally means they want to forbid “book-learning”.

It is also instructive to understand that the Quran calls Jews and Christians “People of the Book”, in other words, people who read and believe the Bible.

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#169

Post by ValentineC »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #148
throwaway27448 wrote: post #139

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…

> 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.

What did China do to Tesla? Aren't the EV firms there more innovative and successful because of the China domestic push towards EV and government incentives around the world?

Re: How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI

#170

Post by owyn »

xp84 wrote: post #146
ifyoubuildit wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 happe…

> 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.

The US is a "christian" nation which has been doing this for decades, even centuries at this point. As recently as a few weeks ago and the official government seems to be pretty joyous about it. I'm pretty sure it's the same "god". Not sure who this god guy is but he seems like an asshole who can justify anything.

> embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes

"happens sometimes" is in the passive voice. What if you live in a war zone and the war isn't far away? Are the people stockpiling AR-15's in the US legitimate military targets? There's a fun 80's movie about Cuba invading the US that you should watch some time. Is that "pro terrorist propaganda"?

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