Essays in the Category "AI and Large Language Models"
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Why AI Keeps Falling for Prompt Injection Attacks
We can learn lessons about AI security at the drive-through
Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models (LLMs) do.
Prompt injection is a method of tricking LLMs into doing things they are normally prevented from doing. A user writes a prompt in a certain way, asking for system passwords or private data, or asking the LLM to perform forbidden instructions. The precise phrasing overrides the LLM’s …
As the AI Arms Race Ramps up, We Can’t Let Big Tech Control Access to Information
More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him.
Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention of making them publicly available. For this, the federal government charged him with a felony and threatened decades in prison. After two years of prosecutorial pressure, Swartz died by suicide on Jan. 11, 2013.
The still-unresolved questions raised by his case have resurfaced in today’s debates over artificial intelligence, copyright and the ultimate control of knowledge…
Could ChatGPT Convince You to Buy Something? Threat of Manipulation Looms as AI Companies Gear up to Sell Ads
This essay also appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Washington Post’s Ripple.
Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI’s development hadn’t consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads.
Unfortunately, the AI industry is now taking a page from the social media playbook and has set its sights on monetizing consumer attention. When OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Search…
Rewiring Democracy Now
A new kind of political engagement emerges in Japan
This is the first in a new multi-part series by Sanders and Schneier going into depth on real-world examples of democratic technologies from their book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship.
When we first heard the name Takahiro Anno a year ago, the then 33-year-old had just mounted a longshot bid for governor of Tokyo. He lacked the backing of any established political party, but won more than 150,000 votes.
That’s not an easy feat for a political newcomer with essentially no resources—no funding for advertising, no campaign apparatus, no political organization. Anno adopted a strategy that differentiated him among the candidates…
AI & Humans: Making the Relationship Work
We are in an era where the greatest success will come from mixed teams of humans and AIs working together. And when it comes to managing those teams, hard-won lessons from decades past still have much to offe
Leaders of many organizations are urging their teams to adopt agentic AI to improve efficiency, but are finding it hard to achieve any benefit. Managers attempting to add AI agents to existing human teams may find that bots fail to faithfully follow their instructions, return pointless or obvious results or burn precious time and resources spinning on tasks that older, simpler systems could have accomplished just as well.
The technical innovators getting the most out of AI are finding that the technology can be remarkably human in its behaviour. And the more groups of AI agents are given tasks that require cooperation and collaboration, the more those human-like dynamics emerge…
Are We Ready to Be Governed by Artificial Intelligence?
Experts Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders explore how Artificial Intelligence is already shaping the executive, judicial, and legislative branches, showing that we are already, at least in part, governed by AI—with more likely to come.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) overlords are a common trope in science-fiction dystopias, but the reality looks much more prosaic. The technologies of artificial intelligence are already pervading many aspects of democratic government, affecting our lives in ways both large and small. This has occurred largely without our notice or consent. The result is a government incrementally transformed by AI rather than the singular technological overlord of the big screen.
Let us begin with the executive branch. One of the most important functions of this branch of government is to administer the law, including the human services on which so many Americans rely. Many of these programs have long been operated by a mix of humans and machines, even if not previously using modern AI tools such as …
Building Trustworthy AI Agents
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The promise of personal AI assistants rests on a dangerous assumption: that we can trust systems we haven’t made trustworthy. We can’t. And today’s versions are failing us in predictable ways: pushing us to do things against our own best interests, gaslighting us with doubt about things we are or that we know, and being unable to distinguish between who we are and who we have been. They struggle with incomplete, inaccurate, and partial context: with no standard way to move toward accuracy, no mechanism to correct sources of error, and no accountability when wrong information leads to bad decisions…
Against the Federal Moratorium on State-Level Regulation of AI
Cast your mind back to May of this year: Congress was in the throes of debate over the massive budget bill. Amidst the many seismic provisions, Senator Ted Cruz dropped a ticking time bomb of tech policy: a ten-year moratorium on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence. To many, this was catastrophic. The few massive AI companies seem to be swallowing our economy whole: their energy demands are overriding household needs, their data demands are overriding creators’ copyright, and their products are triggering mass unemployment as well as new types of clinical …
Four Ways AI Is Being Used to Strengthen Democracies Worldwide
Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from AI, but there are also opportunities.
We have just published the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform Politics, Government, and Citizenship. In it, we take a clear-eyed view of how AI is undermining confidence in our information ecosystem, how the use of biased AI can harm constituents of democracies and how elected officials with authoritarian tendencies can use it to consolidate power. But we also give positive examples of how AI is transforming democratic governance and politics for the better…
Who Will Be the First American Candidate to Harness AI?
Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way.
In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached 100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was integrating social media into his political campaign: Barack Obama. His campaign’s use of social media was so bracingly innovative, so impactful, that it was viewed by journalist David Talbot and others as the strategy that enabled the first term Senator to win the White House…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.