Lessons from recent history could help inform how to prepare for the proliferation of generative AI. For example, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal from just a few years ago sparked new data privacy debates over who should and shouldn’t have access to user data across social networks and the broader ad-tech ecosystem.

Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at McAfee, offered another example: The wave of self-replicating malware worms of the late 1990s and early 2000s — such as Code Red, Nimda and SQL Slammer — which prompted cybersecurity experts to completely rethink standard operating procedures for protecting computer networks.

“We’re right in that lane with this technology now,” Grobman said. “We’re going to have to figure that out. And some of the best practices in 2022 we might need to think about differently as we move forward.”

Over the past few years, McAfee and other companies increasingly applied AI tools such as natural language processing to assess and categorize the web. For example, McAfee researched using adversarial AI — which uses machine learning to make AI attacks fail — to determine how malware bypasses AI-based detection mechanisms.

There are also plenty of examples of how AI text generators are prone to providing wrong answers — known as the “hallucinations” — that pose concerns about the proliferation of both accidental and intentional misinformation. Last week, Google’s market cap fell by $100 billion after a promotional video for its new Bard chatbot featured inaccurate information. And in January, the misinformation research firm NewsGuard said it tested 100 false narratives on ChatGPT and received “eloquent, false and misleading claims” about 80% of the time including topics like Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and school shootings.

“The report shows that this technology as a whole has the potential to democratize the troll farm,” said Jack Brewster, an enterprise editor at Newsguard who worked on the report. “If a bad actor is able to get a hold of this tech and get around the safeguards, they suddenly have the power of 20,000 or more writers that can write clean copy at the push of a button. That could have an incredibly harmful impact on democracies around the world.”

Although the latest AI platforms are still relatively new, they’re already seeing mainstream adoption. ChatGPT, which only debuted late last year, analysts estimate it had 100 million monthly active users in January. And like with past innovations, there’s …read more

Source:: Digiday