This story is interesting: One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about. Among the pre-installed bloatware—or spyware, if you’re being less charitable—was a voice assistant … Read More “Bloatware in Aftermarket Auto Parts” »
Category: AI
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Interesting research: “AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities” Abstract: Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deployment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural networks within host model … Read More “Hiding Capabilities in AI Models” »
Interesting research: Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can solve visual CAPTCHAs without task-specific training, but the agents built on them approach every challenge from scratch. For such an agent, the hundredth instance of a familiar puzzle costs as much time and compute as the first. Specialized detectors invert the trade-off, answering in milliseconds but only for … Read More “Training AIs to Solve CAPTCHAs” »
This is a problem: Any open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it’s a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build. We have abliterated models in the title because it’s the most popular reason people download modified weights without verifying what’s inside. Abliteration is a cheap fine-tune that … Read More “Backdooring Open-Weight AI Models” »
This essay was written with Seva Gunitsky, and originally appeared in Foreign Affairs. Two weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast. She held up a hand-drawn sign behind the anchor’s head that read: “Stop the war. … Read More “How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators” »
This one is from 1809, written by Napoleon’s nephew. Powered by WPeMatico
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian. New campaign finance disclosure data shines a light on which US political campaigns are using AI tools and how much they are spending on them. Candidates’, parties’ and committees’ spending reveals that AI is fast becoming an essential tool of politics. … Read More “How American Political Campaigns Are Using AI—and What They’re Spending on the Tools” »
AI systems are regularly completing tasks in ways that their prompters don’t want or intend. Some of them are disturbing, and some of them are dangerous. This is something I’ve been calling “genie behavior,” because I think that really gets at the core of what’s happening. I wish the popular press would report on this … Read More “I Want Better Reporting on AI Genie Behavior” »
In his 2020 book, “Future Politics,” British barrister Jamie Susskind wrote that the dominant question of the 20th century was “How much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?” But in the early decades of this century, Susskind suggested that we … Read More “Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices” »
Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from AI, but there are also opportunities. We have just … Read More “Four Ways AI Is Being Used to Strengthen Democracies Worldwide” »
