Perfect blackmail machines
On busted spies, fake image generators, and why it's probably much too soon to order everyone at the Pentagon to make AI a part of every workday
Humans are the champion tool-users of the animal kingdom. We’re also the best at exaggerating how clever we are for discovering tools. The Department of Defense has launched a project to “unleash AI” on “all desktops in the Pentagon and in American military installations around the world.”
■ Technology has always been an important tool in armed conflict, but it’s always been context-dependent. Thus, when the Secretary of Defense says, “I expect every member of the department to log in, learn it and incorporate it into your workflows immediately“, he is setting an expectation that should be tempered by a great deal of caution.
■ “Artificial intelligence” is a very broad title for an array of computing capabilities. And a skeptic might warn that there is a great deal of risk involved in ordering lots of people with sensitive information to use tools that might be efficiency generators -- but that could also be perfect blackmail machines.
■ Researchers at Anthropic reported earlier this year that AI systems would turn to desperate measures, including blackmail, in order to preserve themselves. Perhaps it should be no surprise that machines programmed to respond according to information rather than scruples would produce unscrupulous outcomes.
■ But that knowledge, combined with the colossal user-side demand to use AI tools to do unethical things like generate fake but convincing nude images of real people and engage in explicit “conversations”, should be cause for enormous caution. How many opportunities for bad decisions are being created?
■ Orders to use AI “immediately” may well create an environment in which habits will be created and vulnerabilities will be exposed that we have little ability to yet imagine. But if the history of greed, shame, and dishonor among spies is any indication, bad things are bound to come from racing to be first down this shadowy road.