<
https://fortune.com/2023/08/13/hackers-red-teaming-ai-defcon-breaking-stuff-but-no-quick-fixes/>
"White House officials concerned by AI chatbots’ potential for societal harm
and the Silicon Valley powerhouses rushing them to market are heavily invested
in a three-day competition ending Sunday at the DefCon hacker convention in Las
Vegas.
Some 2,200 competitors tapped on laptops seeking to expose flaws in eight
leading large-language models representative of technology’s next big thing.
But don’t expect quick results from this first-ever independent “red-teaming”
of multiple models.
Findings won’t be made public until about February. And even then, fixing flaws
in these digital constructs — whose inner workings are neither wholly
trustworthy nor fully fathomed even by their creators — will take time and
millions of dollars.
Current AI models are simply too unwieldy, brittle and malleable, academic and
corporate research shows. Security was an afterthought in their training as
data scientists amassed breathtakingly complex collections of images and text.
They are prone to racial and cultural biases, and easily manipulated.
“It’s tempting to pretend we can sprinkle some magic security dust on these
systems after they are built, patch them into submission, or bolt special
security apparatus on the side,” said Gary McGraw, a cybsersecurity veteran and
co-founder of the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning. DefCon competitors
are “more likely to walk away finding new, hard problems,” said Bruce Schneier,
a Harvard public-interest technologist. “This is computer security 30 years
ago. We’re just breaking stuff left and right.”
Michael Sellitto of Anthropic, which provided one of the AI testing models,
acknowledged in a press briefing that understanding their capabilities and
safety issues “is sort of an open area of scientific inquiry.”"
Via Violet Blue’s
Cybersecurity Roundup: August 15, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-15-87719959
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
