Monthly Archives: May 2024

Phil 5.31.2024

OpenAI Says Russia and China Used Its A.I. in Covert Campaigns

  • OpenAI said on Thursday that it had identified and disrupted five online campaigns that used its generative artificial intelligence technologies to deceptively manipulate public opinion around the world and influence geopolitics.
  • The efforts were run by state actors and private companies in Russia, China, Iran and Israel, OpenAI said in a report about covert influence campaigns. The operations used OpenAI’s technology to generate social media posts, translate and edit articles, write headlines and debug computer programs, typically to win support for political campaigns or to swing public opinion in geopolitical conflicts.

Supervision and truth

Once a Sheriff’s Deputy in Florida, Now a Source of Disinformation From Russia (AI tools)

  • With the help of commercially available artificial intelligence tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 3, he has filled the sites with tens of thousands of articles, many based on actual news events. Interspersed among them are also bespoke fabrications that officials in the United States and European Union have attributed to Russian intelligence agencies or the administration of President Vladimir V. Putin.

Fake News Reports and Videos Seek to Undermine the Paris Olympics (More traditional active measures)

  • Microsoft estimates that Storm-1679 produces three to eight faked videos a week, in English and French, with many impersonating the BBC, Al Jazeera and other broadcasters. The group appears to respond quickly to news events, like protests in New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific. Others focus on the prospect of a terrorist attack in Paris.

Why this year’s election interference could make 2016 look cute

  • For more than a year, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray has warned about a wave of election interference that could make 2016 look cute. No respectable foreign adversary needs an army of human trolls in 2024. AI can belch out literally billions of pieces of realistic-looking and sounding misinformation about when, where and how to vote. It can just as easily customize political propaganda for any individual target. In 2016, Brad Parscale, Donald Trump’s digital campaign director, spent endless hours customizing tiny thumbnail campaign ads for groups of 20 to 50 people on Facebook. It was miserable work but an incredibly effective way to make people feel seen by a campaign. In 2024, Brad Parscale is software, available to any chaos agent for pennies. There are more legal restrictions on ads, but AI can create fake social profiles and aim squarely for your individual feed. Deepfakes of candidates have been here for months, and the AI companies keep releasing tools that make all of this material faster and more convincing.

Mapping the Increasing Use of LLMs in Scientific Papers

  • Scientific publishing lays the foundation of science by disseminating research findings, fostering collaboration, encouraging reproducibility, and ensuring that scientific knowledge is accessible, verifiable, and built upon over time. Recently, there has been immense speculation about how many people are using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT in their academic writing, and to what extent this tool might have an effect on global scientific practices. However, we lack a precise measure of the proportion of academic writing substantially modified or produced by LLMs. To address this gap, we conduct the first systematic, large-scale analysis across 950,965 papers published between January 2020 and February 2024 on the arXiv, bioRxiv, and Nature portfolio journals, using a population-level statistical framework to measure the prevalence of LLM-modified content over time. Our statistical estimation operates on the corpus level and is more robust than inference on individual instances. Our findings reveal a steady increase in LLM usage, with the largest and fastest growth observed in Computer Science papers (up to 17.5%). In comparison, Mathematics papers and the Nature portfolio showed the least LLM modification (up to 6.3%). Moreover, at an aggregate level, our analysis reveals that higher levels of LLM-modification are associated with papers whose first authors post preprints more frequently, papers in more crowded research areas, and papers of shorter lengths. Our findings suggests that LLMs are being broadly used in scientific writings.

SBIRs

  • Submitted the MORS presentation

Phil 5.26.2024

On vacation, but need to work on the slide deck. Also, some interesting finds:

SBIRs

  • Slides

Phil 5.16.2024

Had an interesting talk with Tim Ellis yesterday, which makes me want to write about growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, how it affected me then, and how things now look as an older adult.

Hmm. Just learned about Kaji, which is a paid search engine. May have to check that out.

SBIRs

  • CUI registration
  • Callbacks today – done!
  • Need to put together slides for Sprint Demos and Stories that I’ll squeeze in on vacation.
    • Need to start putting the MORS deck together. It’s due at the end of this month.
    • Finalize and submit CUI paper and start on slides
    • Work on the book

GPT Agents

  • 2:00 Meeting

Phil 5.15.2024

Tasks

  • Periodontist – called. Seems I hit my limit. Maybe negotiable? Called, we’ll see what happens next. Got a 60% reduction! If you have a big bill, ask if they will provide their “professional discount.” It seems to be a thing.
  • Bank? – Friday?
  • 10:00 Tim – done

SBIRs

  • 1:00 RAG discussion – done. Redirected Eric since RAG is no longer IRAD
  • Change base class to allow setting the app for more complicated figures – done
  • Submit final paper – can’t. I need more info. I did incorporate the reviewer’s suggestion.
  • CUI registration

GPT Agents

  • 2:00 Alden meeting – done

Phil 5.15.2024

[OC] Most common 4 digit PIN numbers from an analysis of 3.4 million. The top 20 constitute 27% of all PIN codes!

SBIRs

  • I got accepted into the CUI 2024 conference! Need to get flights, hotel, and register. Like, today. Flight – done. Hotel – Done. Need to move some funds around to cover all this travel!
    • Also need to prepare a final version of the paper
  • 9:00 standup – done
  • 2:30 BD Meeting – delayed
  • Good progress with Plotly:

Phil 5.13.2024

Tasks

  • Call Judith – done
  • Pay Nathan
  • 2:10 Dentist – done
  • Start vacation spreadsheet
  • Reinstall TexStudio and MikTex
  • Guardian – done!

SBIRs

  • Rework hours from Chris’ data – done. Two versions. One is covered by a split between us and SEG, and the other is where we take the full hit.
  • More Plotly finished the first section and tweaked things a bit so __init__ can be overloaded
  • 1:00 SBIR meeting – on track
  • Deltek appears to be broken – fixed
  • Get hotel reservation number – done

Phil 5.10.2024

Chores

  • Clean house -done
  • Garmin maps – done
  • Stop procrastinating about Guardian
  • Shopping -done
  • Send Tim’s contact info to Nathan – done

SBIRs

  • 2:00 Meeting – done
  • Finish writing Dash OO for StackOverflow
  • Get hotel reservation number

Phil 5.9.2024

Large Language Models Reveal Information Operation Goals, Tactics, and Narrative Frames

  • Adversarial information operations can destabilize societies by undermining fair elections, manipulating public opinions on policies, and promoting scams. Despite their widespread occurrence and potential impacts, our understanding of influence campaigns is limited by manual analysis of messages and subjective interpretation of their observable behavior. In this paper, we explore whether these limitations can be mitigated with large language models (LLMs), using GPT-3.5 as a case-study for coordinated campaign annotation. We first use GPT-3.5 to scrutinize 126 identified information operations spanning over a decade. We utilize a number of metrics to quantify the close (if imperfect) agreement between LLM and ground truth descriptions. We next extract coordinated campaigns from two large multilingual datasets from X (formerly Twitter) that respectively discuss the 2022 French election and 2023 Balikaran Philippine-U.S. military exercise in 2023. For each coordinated campaign, we use GPT-3.5 to analyze posts related to a specific concern and extract goals, tactics, and narrative frames, both before and after critical events (such as the date of an election). While the GPT-3.5 sometimes disagrees with subjective interpretation, its ability to summarize and interpret demonstrates LLMs’ potential to extract higher-order indicators from text to provide a more complete picture of the information campaigns compared to previous methods.

Tasks

  • Guardian
  • Call Judith – done
  • Talk to Nathan about compensating Tim for the unexpected use of his driveway. Done

SBIRs

  • Now that I have Dash running, see if I can plot some activation matrices. I’ll need to put them into DataFrames first. Might even list the various layers/elements and let the UI switch between them. Be a good exercise in learning Dash.
  • 9:00 standup
  • 10:30 AFRL meeting prep. Is there an AFRL meeting as well?
  • 4:30 Book club. I managed to read my chapter!

Dash

GPT Agents

2:00 Meeting. Talk about activations? Also the topic of the invited paper. I’d like to propose ‘The Pancake Printer: AI and the risk of a Two-Tiered Economy.’ It would include things like what’s discussed in Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry (futurism.com). Also, Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet

  • Made a shared doc for ideas

Phil 5.8.2024

https://futurism.com/advon-ai-content

SBIRs

  • Ping Tivren to send the doc – done
  • 8:30 – Stunt Aaron – done
  • Call hotel to reserve at 831-372-7551 – done
  • Build some activation matrices and see what they look like. Drat. They won’t draw in a notebook unless I do some fancier things. It could be that the interactive window is local, and the models are remote. Might be able to get plotly to work instead. It works! Port forwarding and everything. Wild.

Phil 5.7.2024

SBIRs

  • Sent the sanitized paper to Orest and Tivern
  • Sent the latest version of the white paper to Matt
  • Dahlgren expenses – done
  • Get flight, car and hotel for the 92nd Symposium. Got flight and car. Working on hotel.
  • 9:00 Standup
  • Work on pulling out layer activations and using UMAP and/or aligned UMAP
  • I just discovered that you can plot inside of Visual Studio, you need to run a Jupyter notebook once to set things up, then just “run in interactive window“. Works for plotly and matplotlib!

Phil 4.6.2024

Happy Seis de Maio!

Vote!

The Kinetic Sculpture Race was wet, but still fun:

SBIRs

  • Ranked a bunch of potential topics for BD
  • Write up notes from Thursday’s meeting
  • Work with Protima to access activations on the GPT just using HFace, then visualize with UMAP. Started by downloading and prompting the chess model, which is working!
  • Got the environment running again after the password reset!
  • Dahlgren expenses

Phil 3.4.2024

The Kinetic Sculpture Race is tomorrow! hoping that the rain holds off

Last year’s winner

Tasks:

  • 3:30 Ground Rent – done
  • Change AC service date – done
  • Chores – finished all the ones that don’t require a car. Didn’t feel like driving more

SBIRs

  • Initial forms – done
  • Tech transition meeting – went well
  • Reset AWS password – done

Phil 5.2.2024

USNA Capstone all day yesterday

SBIRs

  • 9:00 standup from the car. A truck lost a tire in front of me while I was talking. Sheesh!
  • Meetings in Dahlgren all day – not as much fun as USNA 🙂
  • Make a LinkedIn and BlueSky post on the new paper
  • No book club today

GPT Agents

  • 2:00 Weekly meeting – cancelled since I was stuck in the car