EA - [AISN #4]: AI and Cybersecurity, Persuasive AIs, Weaponization, and Geoffrey Hinton talks AI risks by Center for AI Safety

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [AISN #4]: AI and Cybersecurity, Persuasive AIs, Weaponization, and Geoffrey Hinton talks AI risks, published by Center for AI Safety on May 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Welcome to the AI Safety Newsletter by the Center for AI Safety. We discuss developments in AI and AI safety. No technical background required.Subscribe here to receive future versions.Cybersecurity Challenges in AI SafetyMeta accidentally leaks a language model to the public. Meta’s newest language model, LLaMa, was publicly leaked online against the intentions of its developers. Gradual rollout is a popular goal with new AI models, opening access to academic researchers and government officials before sharing models with anonymous internet users. Meta intended to use this strategy, but within a week of sharing the model with an approved list of researchers, an unknown person who had been given access to the model publicly posted it online.How can AI developers selectively share their models? One inspiration could be the film industry, which places watermarks and tracking technology on “screener” copies of movies sent out to critics before the movie’s official release. AI equivalents could involve encrypting model weights or inserting undetectable Trojans to identify individual copies of a model. Yet efforts to cooperate with other AI companies could face legal opposition under antitrust law. As the LLaMa leak demonstrates, we don’t yet have good ways to share AI models securely.LLaMa leak. March 2023, colorized.OpenAI faces their own cybersecurity problems. ChatGPT recently leaked user data including conversation histories, email addresses, and payment information. Businesses including JPMorgan, Amazon, and Verizon prohibit employees from using ChatGPT because of data privacy concerns, though OpenAI is trying to assuage those concerns with a business subscription plan where OpenAI promises not to train models on the data of business users. OpenAI also started a bug bounty program that pays people to find security vulnerabilities.AI can help hackers create novel cyberattacks. Code writing tools open up the possibility of new kinds of cyberattacks. CyberArk, an information security firm, recently showed that OpenAI’s code generation tool can be used to create adaptive malware that writes new lines of code while hacking into a system in order to bypass cyberdefenses. GPT-4 has also been shown capable of hacking into password management systems, convincing humans to help it bypass CAPTCHA verification, and performing coding challenges in offensive cybersecurity.The threat of automated cyberattacks is no surprise given previous research on the topic. One possibility for mitigating the threat involves using AI for cyberdefense. Microsoft is beginning an initiative to use AI for cyberdefense, but the tools are not yet publicly available.Artificial Influence: An Analysis Of AI-Driven PersuasionFormer CAIS affiliate Thomas Woodside and his colleague Matthew Bartell released a paper titled Artificial influence: An analysis of AI-driven persuasion.The abstract for the paper is as follows:Persuasion is a key aspect of what it means to be human, and is central to business, politics, and other endeavors. Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have produced AI systems that are capable of persuading humans to buy products, watch videos, click on search results, and more. Even systems that are not explicitly designed to persuade may do so in practice. In the future, increasingly anthropomorphic AI systems may form ongoing relationships with users, increasing their persuasive power. This paper investigates the uncertain future of persuasive AI systems. We examine ways that AI could qualitatively alter our relationship to and views regarding persuasion by shifting the balance of persuasi...