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Category Archives: AI

Punishing AI doesn’t stop it from lying and cheating it just makes it hide better, study shows

Live Science: “Punishing artificial intelligence for deceptive or harmful actions doesn’t stop it from misbehaving; it just makes it hide its deviousness, a new study by ChatGPT creator OpenAI has revealed. Since arriving in public in late 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) have repeatedly revealed their deceptive and outright sinister capabilities. These include actions ranging from run-of-the-mill lying, cheating and hiding their own manipulative behavior to threatening to kill a philosophy professor, steal nuclear codes and engineer a deadly pandemic. Now, a new experiment has shown that weeding out this bad behavior during the training process may be even tougher than first thought. Researchers at OpenAI tasked an unreleased model with goals that could be completed by cheating, lying or taking shortcuts. The team found the AI engaged in “reward hacking” — maximizing its rewards by cheating. Yet punishing the model didn’t make it fix its behavior, it only made it more deceptive. The company outlined its research in a blog post, so it has not yet been peer-reviewed. “It’s common for frontier reasoning models to very clearly state their intent within their chain-of-thought [CoT]. For example, they are often so forthright about their plan to subvert a task they think “Let’s hack,” the researchers wrote in the blog post. While developers can monitor and flag misbehavior, the models’ “natural monitorability is very fragile,” they added. “If strong supervision is directly applied to the chain-of-thought, models can learn to hide their intent while continuing to misbehave.”

Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading

Pluralistic: “Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon’s cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing. It’s easy to flap your hands at this bit of thievery… Continue Reading

Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’

Wired [unpaywalled] “Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI…In the days and weeks that followed, DOGE hit one part of the federal government after another. The Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education,… Continue Reading

AI search engines fail accuracy test, study finds 60% error rate

TechSpot: “In context: It is a foregone conclusion that AI models can lack accuracy. Hallucinations and doubling down on wrong information have been an ongoing struggle for developers. Usage varies so much in individual use cases that it’s hard to nail down quantifiable percentages related to AI accuracy. A research team claims it now has… Continue Reading

Spreading AI-generated content could lead to expensive fines

PopSci: “AI-generated “deepfake” materials are flooding the internet, sometimes with dangerous results. In just the last year, AI has been used to make deceiving voice clones of a former US president and spread fake, politically-charged images depicting children in natural disasters. Nonconsensual, AI-generated sexual images and videos, meanwhile, are leaving a trail of trauma impacting… Continue Reading

How Government Data Would Give an AI Company Extraordinary Power

Gizmodo: “The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has secured unprecedented access to at least seven sensitive federal databases, including those of the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration. This access has sparked fears about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and privacy violations. Another concern has received far less attention: the potential use of the data to… Continue Reading

DOGE Has Deployed Its GSAi Custom Chatbot for 1,500 Federal Workers

Wired – no paywall – “Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has deployed a proprietary chatbot called GSAi to 1,500 federal workers at the General Services Administration, WIRED has confirmed. The move to automate tasks previously done by humans comes as DOGE continues its purge of the federal workforce. GSAi is meant to support… Continue Reading

Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having ‘profound’ security and privacy issues

TechCrunch: “Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned Friday that agentic AI could come with a risk to user privacy. Speaking onstage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, the advocate for secure communications referred to the use of AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar,” and cautioned that this new paradigm of computing — where… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 8, 2025

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 8, 2025. Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and… Continue Reading