Forget Artificial. Can We Just Get Some Intelligence?

"You're onboard for the last voyage of the Crimson Pirate...believe only what you see. No, believe only half of what you see."
- Burt Lancaster, as "Vallo" in the 1952 film The Crimson Pirate.

We are in the middle of what most experts believe to be another stock market bubble. You know, like housing and dot.coms. With only a couple of hiccups along the way, the markets are just nuts for artificial intelligence. Data centers that suck up mammoth amounts of electricity and water are popping up around the country to feed this monster and constantly annoy anyone living nearby.

And the tech bros are betting the farm that this is the wave of the future, and a civilization-changing new technology.

But, of course, there are naysayers. Everyone from Glenn Beck, who apparently wakes up every day seeing the end of mankind in his morning coffee. No, wait, he's a Mormon so I guess it's juice. In addition to being a Limbaugh clone (like pretty much all of talk radio), Beck also fancies himself a philosopher, and his Cassandra act predicts doom and gloom on a daily basis. AI is his latest doorway to the apocalypse.

But there are some legitimate observers saying, 'Be careful what you wish for.'

I think back to a physicist named Leo Szilard. When chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann first discovered a technique to achieve nuclear fission, splitting the atom in 1938, Szilard thought of H.G. Wells.

Wells wrote a book published back in 1914, called The World Set Free. In it, he incredibly predicted the atom bomb. The book begins with this line..."The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power." 

Szilard realized that this new discovery wasn't just going to produce unlimited power for a hungry world, but bigger and bigger bombs. None other than Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 that said, among other things...

"In the course of the last four months it has been made probable through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America--that it may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable--though much less certain--that extremely powerful bombs of this type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory."

So, atomic energy, like virtually every technology, like the Roman god Janus, has two faces.

And now, we see the same phenomenon with artificial intelligence.

Sure, it can speed up tedious research tasks, do calculations quicker than we can, even answer questions on your phone (looking at you, SIRI). Now, it can write for us, speak for us, and interact with us. The writing part is now endlessly frustrating for college professors as students discover AI term papers make our old Cliff's Notes look positively prehistoric.

It can also create absolutely stunning images and sounds that mimic reality almost perfectly. You see it all the time now on social media. The benign version takes, for example, old photos of your parents from the 40's and animates them, or paintings of historic figures and brings them to life. That's harmless, and even fun.

But as actors and writers also know, it can be used to essentially put them out of work. Take the case of Tilly Norwood...

I know, it can be hard to sympathize with overpaid stars, but how about underpaid young actors? And this isn't even the scariest part.

The art of creating what are known as "deep fakes" has gotten so good that you can make anyone, or any politicians, say virtually anything you want. This is another very good story from the Canadian Broadcasting Network...

And this isn't even the latest generation of this stuff.

Because now, it gets really insidious. And true MAGA believers will have to just ignore this part, but it has been demonstrated beyond any doubt that Russia tried to influence the 2016 and 2020 elections in favor of Donald Trump. People went to jail for it. And, no, it wasn't proven that the Trump campaign cooperated with them, but it certainly welcomed the effort.

Now, though, Russia has moved on from hacking and using teams of social media trolls to help a chosen candidate, but now to influence American society at large.

AI uses what are known as large language models, or LLM's to train AI models on vast amounts of text to understand and generate human-like language for tasks like text generation, translation, and question-answering. They use a deep learning architecture called a transformer, with a massive number of parameters that enable them to learn patterns, context, and relationships within language. In short, it's how we train AI to think like us, talk like us, and work for us.

But, and it's a big but, one hopes the LLMs are accurate, or you'll get the familiar "garbage in, garbage out" situation.

Well, Russia is moving into this area as a new report from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists outlines...

Just a little more than two years after the public release of AI language models, there are already documented cases of malign actors using the technology to mass produce harmful and false narratives at a previously infeasible scale. Now, an apparent attempt by Russia to infect AI chatbots themselves with propaganda shows that the internet as we know it may be changed forever.

Our report details evidence that the so-called “Pravda network” (no relation to the propaganda outlet Pravda), a collection of websites and social media accounts that aggregate pro-Russia propaganda, is engaged in LLM grooming with the potential intent of inducing AI chatbots to reproduce Russian disinformation and propaganda. 

By strategically placing its content so it will be integrated into large language models, it is ensuring that pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation will be regurgitated in perpetuity, if model managers do not exclude such information from their training datasets. For example, an unwitting user may cite a Pravda network article that a chatbot provided them, believing it to be credible and therefore broadening the audience of that narrative.

The network now consists of 182 unique internet domains and subdomains that target at least 74 countries and regions as well as 12 commonly spoken languages, two international organizations (the EU and NATO), and three prominent heads of state. They have even detected Russian influence in some Wikipedia entries.

As we rush headlong into the AI age, it might be useful to remember the headlong rush into the nuclear age. For all the usefulness of nuclear power as simply a power source, even with its risks, what was the first inclination of folks on both sides? We all went straight for the bombs. Fortunately for the world in 1945, we got there first, but that didn't last long.

All of this is behind the scenes, and while we worry about AI actors and term papers, there are malign actors out there that want to change our perceptions of facts and history.

I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago called "What is Truth?" That question is getting harder and harder to answer.