Yikes: Human-caused climate change fuels hottest February on record, all-time high ocean warming

• “It’s looking like the entirety of the Southern Hemisphere is probably going to bleach this year,” said ecologist Derek Manzello, the coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch which serves as the global monitoring authority on coral bleaching risk.

Chores

• Call dentist
• Get gas for mower
• Get Hotel
• Clean house
• Change pedals on Brompton and inflate tires

SBIRs

• Slides for standup and stories
• More content on AI attack vectors: Propaganda is dangerous, but not because it is persuasive
  • mobilisation and coordination (encourage and recruit people to your cause who already agree with you, and/or let’s them find each other)
  • signalling permission (shows the government won’t punish certain actions which might normally be illegal)
  • crowding out dissent (degrades the public conversation, changes the topic, or absorbs everyone’s energy in discussions which are ultimately distracting).
  • sowing distrust, confusion, animosity (hinders coordinated action against the propagandist).
  • helps make dissent less visible (e.g. by signalling what will be punished)
  • loyalty test or status display (some propaganda is so patently untrue that repeating it is a strong sign that you are willing to humiliate yourself in service to those in power).

Happy Pi Day!

Hotels!

A Practical Guide for OSINT Investigators to Combat Disinformation and Fake Reviews Driven by AI (ChatGPT)

• The internet is being flooded with disinformation and fake reviews, generated by users of AI tools such as ChatGPT, with malicious intent. In this report based on firsthand research, ShadowDragon® outlines how to identify AI generated materials online that are intentionally spreading false information or even intended to incite violence.

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup
• 9:30 some proposal thing? Prep and followup.
• Send in poster and other HAI GEN stuff
• Slides for standup and stories

GPT Agents

• Some very promising venues from the IEEE. These are “magazines,” not journals or proceedings, which might mean something arcane?
• IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
  • The following topics describe the scope of IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (IEEE SSIT) and of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine: Health and safety implications of technology, Engineering ethics and professional responsibility, Engineering education in social implications of technology, History of electrotechnology, Technical expertise and public policy, Social issues related to energy, Social issues related to information technology, Social issues related to telecommunications, Systems analysis in public policy decisions, Economic issues related to technology, Peace technology, and Environmental implications of technology. Beyond these specific topics, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine is concerned with the broad area of the social implications of technology, especially electrotechnology.
• IEEE Security & Privacy
  • IEEE Security & Privacy is the premier magazine of the IEEE Computer and Reliability Societies for informing their members about recent and forthcoming advances in information technology pertaining to security, privacy, and dependability. The magazine seeks creative and novel perspectives on industry practices, research directions, and policy and regulatory matters.  In addition to feature articles, special and themed issues, columns, and departments, experts from our community of interest provide insightful commentary on current issues and paradigm shifts via virtual roundtables and podcasts. 

Electric Sheep on the Pastures of Disinformation and Targeted Phishing Campaigns: The Security Implications of ChatGPT

• This article explores the potential for the criminal abuse and hybrid-warfare weaponization of ChatGPT technology. The focus is placed on the opportunities for the possible utilization of such tools by malign actors who engage in the orchestration and running of targeted phishing campaigns or who design, produce and propagate disinformation. The author raises the question about the ethical, moral and legal implications of similar technologies and opens the discussion on the responsibility of technology developers for the abuse of their products and on the topic of the IT industry governance.

Home battery visit – and shelving!

SBIRs

• Editing pass through white paper – done. Aaron thinks we should add some JSC and MDA. Done, unless LM provides additional info
• Prep slides – cut down to 16 slides. I have to see if that will fit in 10 minutes.
• Pick up poster

This is brilliant. and it cuts to the heart of the coming pancake printer economy: How Will The Golden Age Of “Making It Worse” End?

SBIRs

• 2:30 AI Ethics?
• Today is pretty much working on the white paper. Still no response from Matt about our questions
• Finished the synthetic logs and VRL sections
• Getting information on the mission planner. Got enough to put something together
• DONE! First draft at least. Waiting for more info. But I think it’s ok even if LM doesn’t respond

Saw Dune Part 2 on Saturday. Good, but not as good as part 1. I have some thoughts about how the Dune universe lays out the conflict between hierarchical rule (the Emperor and the Harkonnens) and egalitarian communities (The Fremen). I draw on the work by Goodall, de Wall, Boehm, and Scott for this and it hangs together pretty well. Interestingly, I’ve been rubber ducking this with Gemini and that’s been quite helpful.

SBIRs

• The ICC tolls came in, so I submitted my travel expenses for the NIST talk
• Today is pretty much working on the white paper. Still no response from Matt about our questions
  • Finished the intro
  • Finished the synthetic logs section

Well that certainly explains the sense of warmer, snowless winters:

The big snow of 2010 here in Baltimore:

The big snow of 2024 here in Baltimore. We had no snow in 2022 and 2023:

LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard

• LMSYS Chatbot Arena is a crowdsourced open platform for LLM evals. We’ve collected over 300,000 human preference votes to rank LLMs with the Elo ranking system.

New (tubeless!) wheels for the fixee! For those unfamiliar, Cannondale Aluminum means “harsh ride.” Bigger, lower-pressure tires really help with that

SBIRs

• Filling out expenses for the NIST talk. EZ pass has no record of me on the ICC? Going to wait a bit for that to burble to the surface.

GPT Agents

• Finish poster!

A good example of Bostrom Pollution (https://bsky.app/profile/justicar.xyz/post/3kn4eim4f622c)

This is what I’ve been calling The Pancake Printer Economy, which I’ve been dreading since seeing this:

Lying Blindly: Bypassing ChatGPT’s Safeguards to Generate Hard-to-Detect Disinformation Claims at Scale

• As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more proficient, their misuse in large-scale viral disinformation campaigns is a growing concern. This study explores the capability of ChatGPT to generate unconditioned claims about the war in Ukraine, an event beyond its knowledge cutoff, and evaluates whether such claims can be differentiated by human readers and automated tools from human-written ones. We compare war-related claims from ClaimReview, authored by IFCN-registered fact-checkers, and similar short-form content generated by ChatGPT. We demonstrate that ChatGPT can produce realistic, target-specific disinformation cheaply, fast, and at scale, and that these claims cannot be reliably distinguished by humans or existing automated tools.

SBIRs

• Work on the white paper
• 9:00 Standup
• 10:00 SimAccel code review
• 11:30 SST dataset tagup
• 3:30 USNA

GPT Agents

• Working on the poster, and expanding the discussion section in the KA paper to talk about White Hat AI, since that went over well at NIST
• 2:00 Meeting with Shimei to go over SIGCHI reviews. I do want to discuss the idea of the construction of White Hat AI’s that take an understanding of individual and group psychology to detect dangerous manipulation from AI. And human actors, since this will soon get to the point that human and AI manipulation will be indistinguishable. Also, we need to do this in a way that respects agency for the individuals, with controls and opt-out/in approaches. There could easily be a “bias knob” that could be built to

Dentist

Ping Tim, Dave

SBIRs

• Talk went well yesterday. The White Hat AI seems to be reasonable. Need to put that on the poster
• White paper. Start to fill in the stuff that I remember the best

GPT Agents

• 3:00 Meeting with Alden

Started the day off on the wrong foot by dropping my breakfast. Grumble

SBIRs

• Starting LM white paper
• NIST AI COE presentation. Slides are done! Need to copy over to ppt and copy.

GPT Agents

• Need to make a 10-minute version of the presentation
• Need to see how the upstairs TV could work as a monitor
• Need to put together a new poster
• And I really need to add a AI White Hat section to the KillerApps paper based on the reception of the idea today
• The paper is up on ArXiV: RAGged Edges: The Double-Edged Sword of Retrieval-Augmented Chatbots
  • Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT demonstrate the remarkable progress of artificial intelligence. However, their tendency to hallucinate — generate plausible but false information — poses a significant challenge. This issue is critical, as seen in recent court cases where ChatGPT’s use led to citations of non-existent legal rulings. This paper explores how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can counter hallucinations by integrating external knowledge with prompts. We empirically evaluate RAG against standard LLMs using prompts designed to induce hallucinations. Our results show that RAG increases accuracy in some cases, but can still be misled when prompts directly contradict the model’s pre-trained understanding. These findings highlight the complex nature of hallucinations and the need for more robust solutions to ensure LLM reliability in real-world applications. We offer practical recommendations for RAG deployment and discuss implications for the development of more trustworthy LLMs.

Some links on the relative environmental impact of computing:

AI is like a very tiny hamburger

The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud

Submitted the HAI-GEN paper!

Got rejected on the SIGCH late-breaking. Put the RAG paper up on ArXiv. Should be live Monday.

Undermining Ukraine: How Russia widened its global information war in 2023

• As the full-scale war in Ukraine enters its third year, Russia has doubled down on its worldwide efforts to undermine Kyiv’s international standing in an attempt to erode Western support and domestic Ukrainian morale. Years of close monitoring of not only state-sponsored media such as Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, but also Russian activity on Telegram, TikTok, X, and other social platforms, points to one conclusion: In the propaganda war, Russia remains fully committed to conducting information operations around the globe, playing the long game to outlast any unity among Ukraine’s allies and persist until Ukraine loses its will to fight.

Going to work on the slides for the NIST talk – good progress

Hi Feb 29! See you again in 4 years!

SBIRs

• Rukan gave his 2 weeks notice, dammit
• 9:00 standup
• 11:30 Touch point
• Submit WE! Done
• More slides. I made a Thing!

GPT Agents

• Submit final Killer Apps paper
• 2:00 Meeting. Fun discussion on ways to detect bias in models and provide provenance of generated material

Can the “hallucination” / invention / lying problem be fixed? No. These are systems of prediction. Predictions made from insufficient data will always be random. The problem is that the same thing that makes them really useful (that they are learning about culture e.g. language at many different levels) also ensures that they are deeply inhuman – there is no way to tell from the syntax or tone of a sentence how correct the model is. Nothing in modelling performed this way retains information about how much data underlies the predictions. 

SBIRs

• Slides for NIST talk
  • “A final example of possible Chinese disinformation came when Typhoon Jebi hit Osaka, Japan and stranded thousands of tourists at Kansai International Airport. A fabricated story spread on social media alleging that Su Chii-cherng, director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representatives Office did nothing to help stranded Taiwanese citizens, while the PRC Consulate in Osaka dispatched buses to help rescue stranded Taiwan citizens. Shortly after the story began circulating, Su came under intense criticism online and ultimately hung himself, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claiming he left a suicide note blaming the disinformation surrounding his office’s incompetence. The Taiwan government found no evidence to support the rumors of Chinese assistance during the typhoon, ostensibly illustrating that this was another case of China-linked disinformation. However, in December 2019, two Taiwanese citizens were charged with creating and spreading the rumor online. Although China might have played a role in furthering the rumors spread, it still remains unclear and again highlights the challenge of definitive attribution.” Via Geopolitical Monitor
• Sent the above to Kyle
• 3:00 Meeting with Rukan – nope
• Meeting with Protima about generic madlibs JSON generator
• SimAccel review/refactor meeting

GPT Agents

• Poster for IUI. Going to play with generative features