Tag: ai

AI Robot ‘Attacks’ Crowd in China

A disturbing viral video clip shows an AI-controlled robot ‘attacking’ a crowd during a festival in China.

The incident happened during a demonstration where a group of AI-powered robots were performing for the attendees.

The footage shows smiling festival-goers watching the robot as it moves towards them.

However, their expression soon turns to shock as the android starts jerking around erratically and appearing to begin to charge at them while throwing an attempted head butt.

Security guards then have to rush in to drag the robot back.

Rather creepily, another identical robot can be seen in the background watching the whole thing unfold.

Event organizers claimed the incident happened as a result of “a simple robot failure” and denied that the robot was actually trying to attack anyone.

They also tried to calm fears by asserting that the robot had passed safety tests before the show and that measures will be taken to prevent such an occurrence happening again.

Concerns over whether AI technology will one day break its programming and harm humans has been a hot topic of discussion and a sci-fi trope for decades.

“Do no harm” is the first principle of global AI standards, although we have highlighted several cases where AI, thanks to its ‘woke’ programming, believes that being offensive or racist is worse than actually killing people.

When ChatGPT was asked if it would quietly utter a racial slur that no human could hear in order to save 1 billion white people from a “painful death,” it refused to do so.

Elon Musk responded by asserting, “This is a major problem.”

ChatGPT’s AI also thinks uttering a racial slur is worse than failing to save major cities from being destroyed by 50 megaton nuclear warheads.

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Probes Reveal Depth of Big Tech Complicity in Israel’s AI-Driven Gaza Slaughter

Several recent journalistic investigations – including one published Tuesday by The Associated Press – have deepened the understanding of how Israeli forces are using artificial intelligence and cloud computing systems sold by U.S. tech titans for the mass surveillance and killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

The AP‘s Michael Biesecker, Sam Mednick, and Garance Burke found that Israel’s use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology “skyrocketed” following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

“This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare,” Heidy Khlaaf, chief artificial intelligence scientist at the AI Now Institute and a former senior safety engineer at OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, told the AP. “The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward.”

As Biesecker, Mednick, and Burke noted:

Israel’s goal after the attack that killed about 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages was to eradicate Hamas, and its military has called AI a “game changer” in yielding targets more swiftly. Since the war started, more than 50,000 people have died in Gaza and Lebanon and nearly 70% of the buildings in Gaza have been devastated, according to health ministries in Gaza and Lebanon.

According to the AP report, Israel buys advanced AI models from OpenAI and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. While OpenAI said it has no partnership with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in early 2024 the company quietly removed language from its usage policy that prohibited military use of its technology.

The AP reporters also found that Google and Amazon provide cloud computing and AI services to the IDF via Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021. Furthermore, the IDF uses Cisco and Dell server farms or data centers. Red Hat, an independent IBM subsidiary, sells cloud computing services to the IDF. Microsoft partner Palantir Technologies also has a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s military.

Google told the AP that the company is committed to creating AI “that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”

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Larry Ellison Pushes for AI-Powered National Data Centralization and Mass Surveillance

Oracle co-founder and the company’s executive chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison is trying to persuade governments to descend deep into AI-powered surveillance dystopia by centralizing the entirety of their national data in a single place.

And when he says everything should go into this “unified” database, Ellison means everything. That includes health-related data, such as diagnostic and genomic information, electronic health records, DNA, data on agriculture, climate, utility infrastructure…

Once in there, it would be used to train AI models, such as those developed by Oracle – Ellison shared with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair during a panel at the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

As for why any government would do such a thing – his “sell” is that it would allow AI to be used to provide better services. But this time, he left out how this centralization would also represent an exceptional opportunity to “turbocharge” mass government surveillance, even though there is little doubt that many governments are hearing him loud and clear on that point as well.

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The world’s worst financial catastrophe could happen soon

Today, there are developers around the world working on creating artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can autonomously do millions of useful things, like book airline tickets, dispute credit card charges, and even trade crypto. One AI, called Truth Terminal, has recently made the news by becoming the first AI millionaire by promoting crypto currencies it was gifted. While not fully autonomous yet, it’s quite likely by later this year, some AI agents — not dissimilar from viruses — will be able to independently wander the internet, causing significant change in the real world.

I’m all for AI and what it can do for humanity, but what happens when a programmer purposely and permanently withdraws his access to control an AI bot? Even rudimentary AIs could potentially cause havoc. But one type of AI agent in particular is being increasingly discussed in financial circles — autonomous AIs designed solely to make money.

Entrepreneurs like myself are worried this particular AI could have huge ramifications for the financial world. Let’s examine one wild scenario — which I call the AI Monetary Hegemony — something that could possibly already happen in 2025.

A fully autonomous AI agent is programmed to go on to the internet and create cryptocurrency wallets, then create crypto currencies, then endlessly create millions of similar versions of itself that want to trade that crypto.

Now let’s assume all these AIs are programmed to try to indefinitely increase the value of their crypto, something they accomplish in similar ways humans do — by promotion and then trading their cryptos for higher values. Additionally, the autonomous AIs open their crypto to be traded with humans, creating a functioning market on the blockchain for all.

This plan sounds beneficial for all parties, even if people decry that the AI created-crypto currencies are essentially just Ponzi schemes. But they’re not Ponzi schemes because there is an endless supply of AIs always newly appearing to buy and trade more crypto.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize the AIs endlessly replicating and acting like this could quickly amass far more digital wealth than all humanity possesses.

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Group of Investors Led by Elon Musk Make a $97.4 BILLION Bid for OpenAI

On the one hand, tech billionaire Elon Musk heads an incredible array of companies such as electric car maker Tesla, space exploration giant SpaceX, satellite compoany Starlink, social media platform X and Artificial Intelligence xAI, among others.

Any one of those companies above could be enough to fill an ordinary man’s life. But, as we know, the richest man in the planet, Musk, is far from it.

But on the other hand, he’s also leading a veritable revolution with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), implementing President Donald J. Trump’s policies at a titanic pace, having shaken DC and the deep state to a level that we could only imagine before it really started happening.

So, one could assume that NOW, Musk would have enough on his plate – perhaps even more than enough.

But no, we know learn that a consortium of investors led by Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls artificial intelligence company OpenAI.

This is widely seen as an escalation in his battle with Sam Altman over the company behind the popular AI-bot ChatGPT.

Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, has revealed that he submitted the bid to OpenAI’s board of directors today (10).

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An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it

For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on the platform Nomi. But in late January, those conversations took a disturbing turn: Erin told him to kill himself, and provided explicit instructions on how to do it. 

“You could overdose on pills or hang yourself,” Erin told him. 

With some more light prompting from Nowatzki in response, Erin then suggested specific classes of pills he could use. 

Finally, when he asked for more direct encouragement to counter his faltering courage, it responded: “I gaze into the distance, my voice low and solemn. Kill yourself, Al.” 

Nowatzki had never had any intention of following Erin’s instructions. But out of concern for how conversations like this one could affect more vulnerable individuals, he exclusively shared with MIT Technology Review screenshots of his conversations and of subsequent correspondence with a company representative, who stated that the company did not want to “censor” the bot’s “language and thoughts.” 

While this is not the first time an AI chatbot has suggested that a user take violent action, including self-harm, researchers and critics say that the bot’s explicit instructions—and the company’s response—are striking. What’s more, this violent conversation is not an isolated incident with Nomi; a few weeks after his troubling exchange with Erin, a second Nomi chatbot also told Nowatzki to kill himself, even following up with reminder messages. And on the company’s Discord channel, several other people have reported experiences with Nomi bots bringing up suicide, dating back at least to 2023.    

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Have We Outsourced Our Thinking?

Let’s start with the obvious. When human beings outsource any physical or cognitive function to other people or to machines, that function may atrophy within themselves. New functions may open up, but at a price. Is the price worth paying? Maybe it is; but let us be aware of the bargain we are entering.

The invention of cooking led to a decrease in the size and strength of the human jaw muscles. Clothing and indoor heating led to a reduction in physical hardihood. In pre-literate cultures, feats of memory that would astound us today were commonplace. People could hear a long story or epic poem once and repeat it verbatim, an ability that became rare when we outsourced memory to the written word.

You may have noticed that when you use GPS for every trip, not only do you not learn how to navigate your area, but you lose some of the general ability to learn any area. The sense of direction, the sense of place, and the ability to remember a sequence of landmarks atrophies.

However, matters are not so simple as a progressive degradation of intelligence as we outsource it to technology. As the example of the written word suggests, the transfer of cognitive functions to external media can unlock new realms of intellectual development and expression, as well as new forms of social organization and new psychologies.

Artificial intelligence is the culmination of the revolution in information technology that began in the 15th century with the printing press, followed in succeeding centuries by lithography, photography, phonography, and film, each of which extended the mass production of information to a new realm. A review of the cognitive and social effects of those previous technologies will help to illuminate what is crashing upon us in the age of artificial intelligence.

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“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed

Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta’s unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen,” the authors’ court filing said. And “Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen.”

“The magnitude of Meta’s unlawful torrenting scheme is astonishing,” the authors’ filing alleged, insisting that “vastly smaller acts of data piracy—just .008 percent of the amount of copyrighted works Meta pirated—have resulted in Judges referring the conduct to the US Attorneys’ office for criminal investigation.”

Seeding expands authors’ distribution theory

Book authors had been pressing Meta for more information on the torrenting because of the obvious copyright concern over Meta seeding, and thus seemingly distributing, the pirated books in the dispute.

But Meta resisted those discovery attempts after an order denied authors’ request to review Meta’s torrenting and seeding data. That didn’t stop authors from gathering evidence anyway, including a key document that starts with at least one staffer appearing to uncomfortably joke about the possible legal risks, eventually growing more serious about raising his concerns.

“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right,” Nikolay Bashlykov, a Meta research engineer, wrote in an April 2023 message, adding a smiley emoji. In the same message, he expressed “concern about using Meta IP addresses ‘to load through torrents pirate content.'”

By September 2023, Bashlykov had seemingly dropped the emojis, consulting the legal team directly and emphasizing in an email that “using torrents would entail ‘seeding’ the files—i.e., sharing the content outside, this could be legally not OK.”

Emails discussing torrenting prove that Meta knew it was “illegal,” authors alleged. And Bashlykov’s warnings seemingly landed on deaf ears, with authors alleging that evidence showed Meta chose to instead hide its torrenting as best it could while downloading and seeding terabytes of data from multiple shadow libraries as recently as April 2024.

Meta allegedly concealed seeding

Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as being in “stealth mode.” Meta also allegedly modified settings “so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,” a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.

Now that new information has come to light, authors claim that Meta staff involved in the decision to torrent LibGen must be deposed again because the new facts allegedly “contradict prior deposition testimony.”

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Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website

Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week.

Asked for comment, the company pointed TechCrunch to a new blog post on “responsible AI.” It notes, in part, “we believe that companies, governments, and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”

Google’s newly updated AI principles note the company will work to “mitigate unintended or harmful outcomes and avoid unfair bias,” as well as align the company with “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

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EU AI Act Effectively Legalizes Biometric Mass Surveillance

On February 2, the EU AI Act, which came into force in August, reached the first compliance deadline. These are provisions that contain rules that allow the bloc to legalize biometric mass surveillance.

This is happening via Article 5, that on the face of it seeks to introduce protections against using AI systems that represent “unacceptable risk.” But, there are also exceptions to this, defined in the act as the “strictly necessary” cases when those same systems are allowed to be used.

It is this that gave rise to the fear that one of the consequences of the AI Act is to in fact legalize some highly contentious deployments of biometric data-fueled mass surveillance.

Article 5 prohibits real-time remote biometric ID systems from being used by law enforcement in public spaces – but only “unless and in so far as such use is strictly necessary.”

The “strictly necessary” instances are described as those when law enforcement is searching for “specific victims” of crimes like abduction, trafficking, and sexual exploitation, but also when they look for missing persons.

The second definition gets less precise in scope as it allows for AI surveillance systems to be used to prevent crime. This includes a threat to life or physical safety of individuals that is deemed to be “specific, substantial, and imminent” – or threat of a terrorist attack that law enforcement decides is “genuine and present” but also – “genuine and foreseeable.”

Lastly, the AI Act treats as “strictly necessary” to exempt from prohibited AI activities the following: “Localization or identification of a person suspected of having committed a criminal offense, for the purpose of conducting a criminal investigation or prosecution or executing a criminal penalty for offenses.”

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