Prepping to go to the Eclipse! The forecast is looking pretty good!

SBIRs

• Need to add a story on the April 22 presentation to the IS Dept. Also need to write up the abstract!
• Work on the CUI 2024 submission. Had some fun with MidJourney making a teaser image. I need to brush up on blending in Photoshop

GPT Agents

• Nice chat, went over the white hat AI concept some more. Maybe something for an NSF proposal?
• 4:00 Meeting at UMBC. I got to play wise sage. Fun!

Dont you (forget NLP): Prompt injection with control characters in ChatGPT

• As part of this work, we recently observed some unusual behavior with two popular large language models from OpenAI, in which control characters (like backspace) are interpreted as tokens. This can lead to situations where user-controlled input can circumvent system instructions designed to constrain the question and information context. In extreme cases, the models will also hallucinate or respond with an answer to a completely different question.

SBIRs

• 2 hour meeting in Moorestown with a 2.5 hour drive each way. Not sure it’s worth it, but the meeting went well,
• Closed out my stories, made slides, and created new stories. Still need to do one for the IS Dept presentation on the 22nd

5:00 power washer

CUI 2024 paper:

• Distorting the truth versus blatant lies: The effects of different degrees of deception in domestic and foreign political deepfakes
• Detecting Video Speed Manipulation
• Situational Awareness of Deepfake Technology
• AI Is Not a Unitary Actor: My Response to the UN Interim Report Consultation: “the limits of the almost supernaturalist framing of AI as a unitary actor, rather than a suite of techniques. More useful for the report overall would be of AI as an extension of our human capacities of reasoning, action, and perception that alters what we can do, and therefore our obligations, especially as governments.“
• Made good progress on “The Voice in the Machine” section

SBIRs

• Slide deck and stories for Monday – put in a story to make a sandbox project using a makefile. cookiecutter, name, venv, and source.

GPT Agents

• 3:00 Alden

Need to move the crown appointment

Review board faults Microsoft for ‘cascade’ of errors in China hack

• The report details what it calls a “cascade of avoidable errors.” For instance, Microsoft had not noticed the presence of an old signing key from 2016 that should have been disabled but wasn’t. “That one just sat for years, kind of forgotten,” a second person said. Part of the problem was that Microsoft was supposed to switch from a manual key rotation to an automated system that minimized the chance of human error. But that switch never happened. “They never prioritized fixing the problem,” the first person said.

SBIRs

• More CUI paper. Bring in papers on dark patterns in CUIs and CSCW
• 9:00 Standup
• Ron’s in today? Maybe more setup. Done! Wrote up a story too.
• AI Ethics?
• MCML?

Call powerwasher

SBIRs

• Working on the CUI paper
• Did the vague letter thing. Still not sure why anything should happen, but it’s an encantation maybe?