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+--- Thread: Article Open-source AI is uniquely dangerous (/thread-15266.html)
Open-source AI is uniquely dangerous - C C - Jan 14, 2024
https://spectrum.ieee.org/open-source-ai-2666932122
EXCERPT: . . . I think the open-source movement has an important role in AI. With a technology that brings so many new capabilities, it’s important that no single entity acts as a gatekeeper to the technology’s use. However, as things stand today, unsecured AI poses an enormous risk that we are not yet able to contain.
A good first step in understanding the threats posed by unsecured AI is to ask secured AI systems like ChatGPT, Bard, or Claude to misbehave. You could ask them to design a more deadly coronavirus, provide instructions for making a bomb, make naked pictures of your favorite actor, or write a series of inflammatory text messages designed to make voters in swing states more angry about immigration. You will likely receive polite refusals to all such requests because they violate the usage policies of these AI systems. Yes, it is possible to “jailbreak” these AI systems and get them to misbehave, but as these vulnerabilities are discovered, they can be fixed.
Enter the unsecured models. Most famous is Meta’s Llama 2. It was released by Meta with a 27-page “Responsible Use Guide,” which was promptly ignored by the creators of “Llama 2 Uncensored,” a derivative model with safety features stripped away, and hosted for free download on the Hugging Face AI repository. Once someone releases an “uncensored” version of an unsecured AI system, the original maker of the system is largely powerless to do anything about it.
The threat posed by unsecured AI systems lies in the ease of misuse. They are particularly dangerous in the hands of sophisticated threat actors, who could easily download the original versions of these AI systems and disable their safety features, then make their own custom versions and abuse them for a wide variety of tasks... (MORE - missing details)