There's no doubt that LLMs massively expand the ability of agencies like the NSA to perform large-scale surveillance at a higher quality. I wonder if Anthropic (or other LLM providers) ever push back or restrict these kinds of use cases? Or is that too risky for them?
dumb question. I can understand LLM can be used for disinformation as it can generate text/image at scale. can you explain how it can do large scale surveillance?
I wouldn't say that they can be used to do large-scale surveillance, but they can definitely facilitate it, especially with CV integration. I think one can easily imagine the following scenario: you fill a LLM with photos from people (taken from a public camera for instance), it finds the closest matches (via a web search for instance, as Gemini does). From then, you can easily gather the most essential information: first and last name, age, usernames... And then use this information to structure even more precise prompts and find even more potentially interesting data: posts on forums, relatives... And with this data, you can create an exhaustive database with a plethora of information and data about these people.
That's what any good stalker or person experienced with social engineering is able to do right now, but it takes a lot of time and energy. Resorting to LLMs would considerably decrease both. And it gets easier the more people you have information about.