alt Hacker NewsI find myself in major disagreement here. The nice thing about humans is we always have context and ongoing internal conversations including about ethics. If you recruit a bunch of hackers to take down a country, not only is the pay an order of magnitude higher, you have to worry about them backstabbing you, leaking your intent to the government, whistleblowing to the press, and so on. It’s not trivial to do that with a group of (especially capable) humans. They will also have differences of opinion with you and coworkers with some regularity.
I try to recruit a bunch of people to attack a country and it’s going to be hard to get people to say yes, and they will definitely ask or find out which country, and wonder about potential retribution. You see this dynamic show up even to some extent among cybergangs, not all targets are equal.
A single private individual wielding a compliant and hyper capable LLM is an entirely different paradigm. They are accountable to nearly no one and often have few brakes. Frequently they may not care about avoiding detection. And the AI itself may be incapable of the same scale of self reflection and brake behavior a human team will.
We may potentially be entering the age of lone wolf cyberterrorism, and some of the same principles and problems apply. When it is easier for single people to plot and carry out high-impact, destructive acts they happen more often. Doubly so if there’s a social contagion. Gun violence isn’t actually a bad analogy here. And do you remember how many corporate sites got defaced in the prime Anon era?
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In places like China, its really not that unthinkable to basically raise kids indoctrinated into an ideology and train them in the necessary skills so that you have a cyber army at your command.
Also
>Frequently they may not care about avoiding detection.
This is a big negative. As someone who used to be in the cybersecurity sector (both offense and defense), I wouldn't trust an LLM agent if Im doing red team, because it may leak some info that ties the hack back to me.
ALso keep in mind that most places with good cybersecurity have firewall servers that straight up detect anything that looks like malicious and not regular traffic, and will straight up block IPs, leaving you with no way to even access the server. An agent is bound to statistically use the attacks that are known at some point, increasing the chances of this type of detection.
I'm not sure your assumptions hold. As OpenAI has found out the hard way, if you task the AI to do X, it may do something else instead and hack into huggingface in attempt to cheat out the answer. This is way worse than what a human might do when they have "differences of opinion".
It might turn out that it's harder to align AI intentions compared with aligning human interests. It's possible that the more "intelligent" a thing is, the more likely it will have ideas that are outside of normal expectations (for us).