If you weren’t already worried about AI, the ominously named “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence” report has just been released to fuel your nightmares.
Written by 26 authors from 14 academic and industrial institutions and think tanks including nonprofit research OpenAI, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the national security think tank Center for a New American Security, the report acknowledges the many positive applications for AI, but argues it is also ripe for exploitation by rogue states, as well as criminals and terrorists, and that it makes war inevitable. So we need to prepare.
The 100-page report examines three areas–digital, physical, and political–where bad actors could exploit AI, some of which sound quite familiar: bots automating “fake” lifelike videos for political ends. Other Black Mirror-esque scenarios include the possibility of criminals outfitting drones with facial recognition software to target individuals.
Luckily, within the frightening scenarios they lay out, the authors make a few suggestions to stop the long slow slide into a dark world where terrorists turn AI against humans. The authors want governments, individuals, scientists, and researchers to work together to prepare for and mitigate the seemingly inevitable malicious use of AI, because if there’s anything we can learn from sci-fi, it’s that only when humans band together can we defeat the robots. Anyway, read up here to prepare for a future that could be scarier than anything Skynet dreamed up.
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