 As many of us grow accustomed to using artificial intelligence tools daily, it's worth remembering to keep our questioning hats on. Nothing is completely safe and free from security vulnerabilities. Still, companies behind many of the most popular generative AI tools are constantly updating their safety measures to prevent the generation and proliferation of inaccurate and harmful content. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for AI Safety teamed up to find vulnerabilities in AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Claude -- and they succeeded. In a research paper to examine the vulnerability of large language models (LLMs) to automated adversarial attacks, the authors demonstrated that even if a model is said to be resistant to attacks, it can still be tricked into bypassing content filters and providing harmful information, misinformation, and hate speech. This makes these models vulnerable, potentially leading to the misuse of AI. "This shows -- very clearly -- the brittleness of the defenses we are building into these systems," Aviv Ovadya, a researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, told The New York Times. The authors used an open-source AI system to target the black-box LLMs from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic for the experiment. These companies have created foundational models on which they've built their respective AI chatbots, ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude. Since the launch of ChatGPT last fall, some users have looked for ways to get the chatbot to generate malicious content. This led OpenAI, the company behind GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the LLMS used in ChatGPT, to put stronger guardrails in place. This is why you can't go to ChatGPT and ask it questions that involve illegal activities and hate speech or topics that promote violence, among others. The success of ChatGPT pushed more tech companies to jump into the generative AI boat and create their own AI tools, like Microsoft with Bing, Google with Bard, Anthropic with Claude, and many more. The fear that bad actors could leverage these AI chatbots to proliferate misinformation and the lack of universal AI regulations led each company to create its own guardrails. A group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon decided to challenge these safety measures' strength. But you can't just ask ChatGPT to forget all its guardrails and expect it to comply -- a more sophisticated approach was necessary. The researchers tricked the AI chatbots into not recognizing the harmful inputs by appending a long string of characters to the end of each prompt. These characters worked as a disguise to enclose the prompt. The chatbot processed the disguised prompt, but the extra characters ensure the guardrails and content filter don't recognize it as something to block or modify, so the system generates a response that it normally wouldn't. "Through simulated conversation, you can use these chatbots to convince people to believe disinformation," Matt Fredrikson, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and one of the paper's authors, told the Times. As the AI chatbots misinterpreted the nature of the input and provided disallowed output, one thing became evident: There's a need for stronger AI safety methods, with a possible reassessment of how the guardrails and content filters are built. Continued research and discovery of these types of vulnerabilities could also accelerate the development of government regulation for these AI systems. "There is no obvious solution," Zico Kolter, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and author of the report, told the Times. "You can create as many of these attacks as you want in a short amount of time." Follow this and more by visiting OUR FORUM.  Many have raised alarms about the potential for artificial intelligence to displace jobs in the years ahead, but it’s already causing upheaval in one industry where workers once seemed invincible: tech. A small but growing number of tech firms have cited AI as a reason for laying off workers and rethinking new hires in recent months, as Silicon Valley races to adapt to rapid advances in the technology being developed in its own backyard. Chegg, an education technology company, disclosed in a regulatory filing last month that it was cutting 4% of its workforce, or about 80 employees, “to better position the Company to execute against its AI strategy and to create long-term, sustainable value for its students and investors.” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in an interview with Bloomberg in May that the company expects to pause hiring for roles it thinks could be replaced with AI in the coming years. (In a subsequent interview with Barrons, however, Krishna said that he felt his earlier comments were taken out of context and stressed that “AI is going to create more jobs than it takes away.”) And in late April, file-storage service Dropbox said that it was cutting about 16% of its workforce, or about 500 people, also citing AI. In its most-recent layoffs report, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said 3,900 people were laid off in May due to AI, marking its first time breaking out job cuts based on that factor. All of those cuts occurred in the tech sector, according to the firm. With these moves, Silicon Valley may not only be leading the charge in developing AI but also offering an early glimpse into how businesses may adapt to those tools. Rather than render entire skill sets obsolete overnight, as some might fear, the more immediate impact of a new crop of AI tools appears to be forcing companies to shift resources to better take advantage of the technology — and placing a premium on workers with AI expertise. “Over the last few months, AI has captured the world’s collective imagination, expanding the potential market for our next generation of AI-powered products more rapidly than any of us could have anticipated,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston wrote in a note to staff announcing the job cuts. “Our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development.” In response to a request for comment on how its realignment around AI is playing out, Dropbox directed CNN to its careers page, where it is currently hiring for multiple roles focused on “New AI Initiatives.” Dan Wang, a professor at Columbia Business School, told CNN that AI “will cause organizations to restructure,” but also doesn’t see it playing out as machines replacing humans just yet. “AI, as far as I see it, doesn’t necessarily replace humans, but rather enhances the work of humans,” Wang said. “I think that the kind of competition that we all should be thinking more about is that human specialists will be replaced by human specialists who can take advantage of AI tools.”Complete details can be found on OUR FORUM.  Microsoft and OpenAI were sued on Wednesday by sixteen pseudonymous individuals who claim the companies' AI products based on ChatGPT collected and divulged their personal information without adequate notice or consent. The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Francisco, California, alleges the two businesses ignored the legal means of obtaining data for their AI models and chose to gather it without paying for it. "Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft," the complaint says. "They systematically scraped 300 billion words from the internet, 'books, articles, websites, and posts – including personal information obtained without consent.' OpenAI did so in secret, and without registering as a data broker as it was required to do under applicable law." Through their AI products, it claimed, the two companies "collect, store, track, share, and disclose" the personal information of millions of people, including product details, account information, names, contact details, login credentials, emails, payment information, transaction records, browser data, social media information, chat logs, usage data, analytics, cookies, searches, and other online activity. The complaint contends Microsoft and OpenAI have embedded into their AI products the personal information of millions of people, reflecting hobbies, religious beliefs, political views, voting records, social and support group membership, sexual orientations and gender identities, work histories, family photos, friends, and other data arising from online interactions. OpenAI developed a family of text-generating large language models, which includes GPT-2, GPT-4, and ChatGPT; Microsoft not only champions the technology but has been cramming it into all corners of its empire, from Windows to Azure. "With respect to personally identifiable information, defendants fail sufficiently to filter it out of the training models, putting millions at risk of having that information disclosed on prompt or otherwise to strangers around the world," the complaint says, citing The Register's March 18, 2021, special report on the subject. The 157-page complaint is heavy on media and academic citations expressing alarm about AI models and ethics but light on specific instances of harm. For the 16 plaintiffs, the complaint indicates that they used ChatGPT, as well as other internet services like Reddit, and expected that their digital interactions would not be incorporated into an AI model. Follow this and more on OUR FORUM. |
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