Schneier on Security

Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a new metric: the Genie coefficient.

There’s often a gap between one person’s request and another’s understanding. Most of the time, we bridge it using general knowledge. For example, if you ask a friend to get you coffee, they’ll pour a cup from the pot or buy one from a coffee shop. They won’t bring you a bag of raw beans or snatch a cup from a stranger and hand it to you. You never specified any of this. You never had to…

Opposition to AI data centers has emerged as a primary theme in US politics, one that—surprisingly—doesn’t fall along party lines. We applaud people coming together for constructive debate on any issue, and agree that communities need to evaluate whether any economic benefits these data centers bring is worth their costs. Still, we worry that a focus on data centers obscures the larger impacts of AI on people’s lives: the concentration of power of AI companies, and their widespread political and financial influence.

Local data center opposition is grounded in legitimate concerns about misallocation of land resources when housing is at a premium, …

Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves,” and that they generally know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” the court held that the AI’s summaries are reflections of the company and “above all an expression of Google’s business activities.”

This is the latest skirmish in a decades-old battle over internet publishing. Historically, there were two different types of information distributors: carriers and publishers. A phone company is a carrier. It’ll transmit whatever you say, even discussions about committing a crime. Words are words, and the phone company does not know—nor is it liable for—the words you choose to speak. A newspaper, on the other hand, is a publisher. It decides the words it publishes, and what quotes to include in its articles. If those words or quotes are defamatory or otherwise illegal, it’s liable…

Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?”

We agree entirely that this is one of the most potent questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, surveys the emerging uses for and impacts of AI in democracy around the world and reaches the same conclusion: that the most urgent risk posed by AI is the …

Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They’re trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and our speech as captured in movies and on television. These models have minimal access to the unscripted conversations we have face to face or voice to voice. This is the vast majority of speech, and a vital component of human culture.

There’s a risk to this. The increased use of large language models means we humans will encounter much more AI-generated text. We humans, in turn, will begin to adopt the linguistic patterns and behaviors of these models. This will affect not just how we communicate with one another, but also how we …