alt Hacker News 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 have no doubt terrorists are aided by LLMs in a general sense, but 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, and would want to see real evidence, not an interview snippet.
Replies
It's never been particularly difficult to discern how to assemble a bomb, or C4, or napalm, or.... etc. Difficulty in accessibility of violence has never been what protected society. Except, I'm willing to bet, in FBI funding meetings.
How do they bypass the AI safety measures?
I read stuff like this and think I must be an idiot because I'm so bad at circumventing the AI safety for fairly benign queries. And here you have folks making bombs...?
> 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 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.
If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
And obviously yes there are exceptions, since we can all think of infamous terrorist plots which succeeded due to clearly some sophisticated planning and hard work.
It’s that thing where a young child is incapable of realizing their lies are obvious. There’s a kind of pathetic sadness when adults do it.
And I met a Boko General and he said, "Sir, please, sir, build up our military" while fighting away tears.
There's lots of knowledge out there about stuff like this. Milennia of humans tinkering with things that go boom. Surfacing it more easily has value (in a manner of speaking; as the @dril tweet goes, "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them'").
How many of those are available in the language(s) they speak, though? AI might have been used as a glorified Google Translate here.
> 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!