Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments—almost certainly AI-generated—to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption.
I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hacker’s Mind, but this is a new one.
Valerio • April 17, 2024 8:30 AM
I really don’t think it needs an AI to be done (although it is the topic of the moment). To give an example in September 2015 in the Senate of the Italian Republic 82 million amendments to a certain law were submitted by a single senator who candidly admitted that he had generated them with an unspecified algorithm that acted on punctuation, grammar rules and synonyms.
echo • April 17, 2024 9:18 AM
@Winter
Oops. That was embarrassing. I want to crawl into a hole for a week.
Funz • April 17, 2024 10:04 AM
It was Lega Nord party IIRC.
Clive Robinson • April 17, 2024 10:17 AM
@ Bruce, ALL,
Re : When GIGO sings along, the AI way.
“Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments—almost certainly AI-generated—to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption.
“
This is an assumed “asymmetric attack” that only works because it carries no obvious penalties for the attackers in their “Greater Goal Game”(GGG).
The AI is given “Garbage In”(GI) via it’s corpus and is asked to produce “Garbage Out”(GO) via it’s “Stochastic Parrot”(SP).
Now the question arises as to penalties to stop it and non obvious penalties.
One of the non obvious penalties is that the GO of the SP is in effect generated by some filtered variation of the toss of a coin at some semantic level. As such it could produce amendments that go either way. That is for or against the attackers.
So unless they read the amendments thoroughly before submitting them, there is some chance they could end up shooting themselves in the foot. Or more correctly as Shakespeare once noted,
“Hoist by their own petard”.
But this sort of GGG can work for either side of the house, and eventually one or both sides will tire of it and thus try to legislate it out.
The problem is of course double,
1, Overly broad scope.
2, Unintentional consequences.
To see this imagine a penalty system based on how many amendments you make that get struck down. You cross a threshold and your “rate” of amendment proposals is cut…
The defenders could pre table contentious or provocative legislation to make you use up your amendment proposing rate.
There is no easy way to stop AI GICO being used as a tactical legislative battle field, the law of unintended consequences will always be “sitting on the bench” waiting to unexpectedly come into play.
Zaphod • April 17, 2024 12:20 PM
@Clive
How about the person tabling the amendments has to, as a prior requirement, have read all of them out aloud to an elected representative of the Bill. With the caveat that this cannot delay the passage of the bill.
Probably more caveats required but I think I’ve got the gist.
Z
lurker • April 17, 2024 2:38 PM
@Zaphod
And I would run the amendments through an AI to see how many could be thrown out on technicalities. Maybe they did this anyway. The article says their house committe whittled the 18,000 down to 200 in a month, and the Speaker has joined in with human cunning to bundle them for voting, so where’s the beef?
vas pup • April 17, 2024 3:10 PM
On AI:
As anxiety surges during war, Israeli GenAI platform can ease psychiatrists’
workload
h ttps://www.timesofisrael.com/as-anxiety-surges-during-war-israeli-genai-
platform-can-ease-psychiatrists-workload/
“With the number of Israelis feeling anxious from the ongoing war soaring, a new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platform offers the possibility of quicker and more effective mental health screening.
The platform, called LIV, acts as a psychiatric triage system. It gives a person “someone” to converse with about their feelings and concerns. At the same time, LIV helps streamline a physician’s workload by generating possible diagnoses and treatment recommendations.
While the doctor creates the actual clinical diagnosis and treatment plan, LIV
serves as a support system for making clinical decisions based on its
“conversations” with patients.
This reporter tried LIV and found it to be almost akin to having an open-ended,
heart-to-heart conversation with a real person. Like a psychiatrist, the platform knows how to take the conversation gently forward with the right questions to arrive at a possible diagnosis.
LIV and this reporter were in conversation for nearly half an hour about the war’s effects, including the April 14 attack by Iran on Israel. LIV was constantly reflecting back what this reporter expressed and felt, seemingly identifying with it. This made it easy and safe to open up to “her.”
LIV was presented in March at HIMSS, the world’s largest digital medicine conference. It operates using LLM, a type of AI program trained on huge data sets and built on machine learning that can recognize and generate text.
It also uses information from DSM-5, a manual of mental disorders published by
the American Psychiatric Association. As LIV is used by more and more people, it fine-tunes itself to be even more sophisticated and accurate.
“Some people in the clinical study are spending 60 minutes talking with LIV instead of the average 30
because they feel very comfortable to elaborate because they feel that no one is judging them. Some mention how they find LIV more empathic than a real therapist,” Shtein said.
“However, I would want to know whether the platform will be affordable and
whether security measures are in place so that unauthorized people would not be able to get a hold of patients’ personal and medical information,” Kohn said.
LIV is not a standalone application that someone can simply download on their phone.
“Our clients are not the individual patients. Our clients are hospitals, health maintenance organizations, and the IDF — which we are in the process of setting up a trial with now,” she said.
When LIV is acquired by one of these clients, the patient will only be able to
access it through the secured cloud-based interface that the client uses to
communicate with its registered patients. This is almost always through a two-factor authentication process.
The fact that LIV “lives” at a hospital or HMO is critical for the platform to
work properly
when a person shares that they want to hurt themselves or others, or exhibits
suicidal ideation. If this happens, LIV shuts down and immediately alerts medical staff, who can jump into action to reach the person in acute distress.
“We always have a human in the loop,” Shtein said.”
Clive Robinson • April 17, 2024 4:02 PM
@ Zaphod,
Nice to hear from you,
But…
“How about the person tabling the amendments has to, as a prior requirement, have read all of them out aloud to an elected representative of the Bill.”
Is there not something about “cruel and unnatural punishment” in the US system?
It does seam a harsh punishment for the elected representative to be forced to sit and listen to the attacker 😉
Plus where is the entertainment value for C-Span viewers?
I thought in the US “politics was a blood sport” of Roman Circus ethics or worse 😇
lurker • April 17, 2024 4:42 PM
@Clive Robinson
I eouldn’t know, living in the Southern hemisphere, but I assumed the subject incident occurred north of the 49th parallel.
Clive Robinson • April 17, 2024 6:28 PM
@ Lurker,
“I assumed the subject incident occurred north of the 49th parallel.”
What can I say in my defence 😉
The fact the report made it feel “So American” as did “the behaviour” of those conservative politicians giving value for money to what sound like American BigEnergy corporate lobbying…
What was needed was a clear differentiation say a “Mountie in uniform” or similar to remind us, but… Today is wednesday, and I guess we need something more as Canadian Politicians see themselves as a stand in,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FshU58nI0Ts
(For those in the EU there is a version in psudo-german).
Clive Robinson • April 17, 2024 7:17 PM
@ Bruce, ALL,
You do not need AI to make political points
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ifLqzLEB3E0
Some times the question “Why?” Can not be answered so you might as well, if the opportunity arises, just enjoy the madness.
paula h • April 17, 2024 7:54 PM
Zaphod and Clive, making the legislator read their entire very long bill aloud would just be called a filibuster in the USA (and elsewhere; it goes back to ancient Rome). I assume Bruce mentioned it in the referenced book.
It turns out that the rules sometimes allow a politictian to speak for as long as they want. Politicians are the last group of people to which such an invitation should be proffered, and I doubt Zaphod’s proposal wouldn’t stop them (especially if they’re willing to wear diapers). Strom Thurmond read the election laws of every state, some court decisions, and a George Washington speech… for over 24 hours, in a last-ditch effort to keep racial segregation legal.
Shymaa Arafat • April 18, 2024 12:30 AM
I’m sorry I’m not commenting on the exact topic of the post, but I thought if you Sir suggested a topic & managed its workshop
https://securecomm.eai-conferences.org/2024/call-workshop-proposals/
It would be really of great value.
.
I also thought you may be willing to participate on my workshop proposal on e-voting.
(I realize that your blog is rich with more other valuable & interesting topics)
.
It’s really impressive to find the author of the first cryptography book I’ve read even before Stallings, we shared photo copied chapters of your book for a year or two before even seeing the real book and I was fascinated by the DES S-Boxes secret story, the meetings they made objecting,…etc and how they discovered the reason after 20 years, it was defense against deferential attacks.
.
In the memory of Prof. Dr
Ahmed Belal, the one who gave us (his post graduate students) your book
.
Regards,
Shymaa Arafat
Clive Robinson • April 18, 2024 2:30 AM
@ paula h,
I hope you are well and things are moving in the progressing nicely direction?
As for,
“It turns out that the rules sometimes allow a politictian to speak for as long as they want.”
Does that give their comfortably seated colleagues,
“Just cause to sleep on the job?”
As they say,
“Just asking for a friend” 😉
paula h • April 18, 2024 10:37 AM
Does that give their comfortably seated colleagues,
“Just cause to sleep on the job?”
It does, and they’re not necessarily seated; sometimes beds are brought in, as during a January 2011 filibuster in the U.K.’s House of Lords. It’s important to stay rested, because tiredness can be exploited as a security flaw. Quoting Wikipedia: “On April 4 [1997], exhausted and often sleepy government members inadvertently let one of the NDP amendments pass, and the handful of residents of Cafon Court in Etobicoke[, Ontario, Canada] were granted the right to a public consultation on the bill, although the government subsequently nullified this with an amendment of its own.”
Clive Robinson • April 18, 2024 12:00 PM
@ paula h,
“… were granted the right to a public consultation on the bill, although the government subsequently nullified this with an amendment of its own.”
So the “Representatives of the People” were being typically “dictatorial” and doing “Might is Right” nonsense on the pretense of “for the common good”…
I wonder which side got the better stuffed “brown envelopes” from the lobbyists?
It’s funny to think that few now know why “brown envelopes” were associated with sinfulness…
Tony H. • April 19, 2024 9:31 PM
@lurker: Ottawa is not north of the 49th parallel – in fact it’s barely north of 45, and so a fair way south of e.g. Seattle. And well over half the population of Canada lives south of the 49th.
@Clive: I suppose “Canadian legislators” does sound rather American… Maybe “Canadian MPs”?
lurker • April 20, 2024 2:53 AM
@Tony H
Mea culpa, see what comes from watching too many war movies
‘https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033627/
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
echo • April 17, 2024 8:22 AM
Ruth Ben-Ghiat has written in her books on fascism that the far right have always been quick to embrace shiny innovations. The Nazi’s did it. Golden Dawn in Italy did it. The murkey world of Londonstan (which includes but is not limited to Cambridge Analytica) did it. No surprise I suppose that the right wing are leaping on the AI choo-choo train to escalate legislation wrecking.
This seems reasonable to me. It adds to my line of thought that the right wing are a glorifed death cult addicted to cruelty. Pierre Poilievre’s profile reads like an identikit Tory. No surprise there either.