🙀 Pentagon AI Chief is ‘Scared to Death’ of ChatGPT

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👀 Today’s Thing: Pentagon AI Chief is ‘Scared to Death’ of ChatGPT

🤖 The US Defense Department’s chief digital and AI officer said he’s “scared to death,” about the potential for ChatGPT and other consumer-friendly AI agents to be weapons of mass disinformation. “Here’s my biggest fear about ChatGPT,” Martell said. “It has been trained to express itself in a fluent manner. It speaks fluently and authoritatively. So you believe it even when it’s wrong… And that means it is a perfect tool for disinformation…We really need tools to be able to detect when that’s happening and to be able to warn when that’s happening.”

🎧 Want to go deeper? Listen to my interview with UC Riverside’s Vagelis Papalexakis about the algorithm he developed to detect fake news.

📖 Backstory

☞ Generative large language models (LLMs) excel at generating confident, authoritative sounding text. Chatbots like ChatGPT offer a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for consumers to access the LLM.

☞ LLMs are also known for their hallucinations, the industry term for when an LLM makes stuff up without acknowledging that it’s factually inaccurate.

☞ The US Department of State, among many others, has grown increasingly concerned about the potential for LLMs to create sophisticated disinformation campaigns cheaply and quickly.

🔑 Keys to Understanding

🥇 Citizens and officials in the United States are preparing for a wave of “deepfake” disinformation in the run up to the 2024 presidential election. A deepfake is piece of synthetic media that has been digitally altered to replace one person's likeness with that of another. Advances in AI have made audio and video deepfakes increasingly realistic while simultaneously becoming cheaper and easier to create.

🥈 The US Republican National Committee has already released a “What If” video ad featuring AI-generated imagery of imaginary, apocalyptic scenes from a re-elected President Biden’s second term.

🥉 Speaking to software vendors at a defense industry event last week, Martell called for AI service providers to help make the lines between fact and AI-generated disinformation clearer, saying, “My call to action to industry is: don’t just sell us the generation. Work on detection.”

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Until the next thing,

- Noah

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