You type in the question or use your voice and it [AI] gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?’ and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot! We used it a lot.
I’m pretty skeptical reading this bit. I’ve seen uncensored or jailbroken LLM replies to these kind of questions, they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t, and are hard to provoke if you’re not using an uncensored model.
I have no doubt terrorists are aided by LLMs in a general sense, but am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, and would want to see real evidence, not an interview snippet.
There's lots of knowledge out there about stuff like this. Milennia of humans tinkering with things that go boom. Surfacing it more easily has value (in a manner of speaking; as the @dril tweet goes, "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them'").
Yeah Dugan Ashley recently went to jail because a terrorist found his RDX synthesis video on YouTube (where it and other videos had been for years) and used it (incorrectly) in NOLA. The CIA literally released to public domain how to make the blasting caps, the government released the full synthesis of secondary explosives from the patent office...
His videos of making them were on YouTube for years, publicly. It's legal to synthesize the explosives he made. What they did was charge him for the first amendment protected activity that a terrorist then found, and then they claimed that because he made some money because a few people donated a small amount to him for making the videos, and thus he needed a commercial license for being in the business of making explosives.
By the way this is the same thing they tried to charge FPSRussia (the first time, before they convicted him for weed) for and failed.
I read stuff like this and think I must be an idiot because I'm so bad at circumventing the AI safety for fairly benign queries. And here you have folks making bombs...?
This is covered in the full PDF; they have many accounts they spread the queries over and structure them like they're asking for help writing a movie script.
> am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities,
This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. All the information they need is in books and old patents and what-not, but they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
And obviously yes there are exceptions, since we can all think of infamous terrorist plots which succeeded due to clearly some sophisticated planning and hard work.
> This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots.
What even is a terrorist?
If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.
Boko Haram is not a mentally disabled person tricked by the FBI they are real terrorists who attack schools to stop children from learning. They're the epitome of stupid and backwards.
I'm not admiring or excusing anyone. I'm saying you probably find a whole range of IQs among them. Because why wouldn't you? Whose to say if the userbase of this site grew up in the wrong conditions, a portion wouldn't be terrorists too?
> If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
That's a great example of selection bias: if they were intelligent enough to be capable of causing harm at that scale, they would have immediately realized the new guy suggesting targets and offering to buy them explosives was an FBI agent.
> "one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter"
yes, but only to weak-minded cultural relativists.
I don't mind stating a definition explicitly. If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
Note: The only real complexity in the definition is that during war, embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes, and when it does, it's the ones choosing to do that, war criminals by definition, who bear the responsibility for those innocent deaths when those locations then become legitimate military targets.
I'll omit giving examples to avoid triggering those who like to "bothsides" some of the more well-known terrorist groups lately.
> If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
The US is a "christian" nation which has been doing this for decades, even centuries at this point. As recently as a few weeks ago. I'm pretty sure it's the same "god". Not sure who this guy is but he seems like an asshole.
> embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes
"happens sometimes" is in the passive voice. What if you live in a war zone and the war isn't far away? So are the people stockpiling AR-15's in the US legitimate military targets? There's a fun 80's movie about Cuba invading the US that you should watch some time.
>If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
In my head I was running through a whole lot groups to replace "terrorists" with in that sentence...
> If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that...
There are a lot of very smart people joining cults, including people who just wanted to study them and were fully aware that what they believed in was nonsense. Terrorist groups are cults.
Just because you consider yourself smart because you have a PhD, high IQ, built a successful company or practice some intellectual activity and are good at it doesn't mean you are immune to the manipulation tactics used by cults. Once sufficiently brainwashed, your judgment will get clouded, but it doesn't mean you will lose your technical skills, which you will put to the service of the cult.
Think about Nazi Germany. Germans weren't idiots, the simple fact that most of the world had to turn against them to defeat them is proof enough. But they still managed to get manipulated into committing the worst crimes.
The reason it worked is not stupidity, it is misery. They were at their lowest following WW1, and Hitler promised them better. Same idea for terrorist groups and other cults, people who are experiencing hardships are the easiest to indoctrinate, and there is no shortage of such people in Nigeria.
Well said. As mentioned in another post, it's not about intelligence, it's about vulnerability. One particular type of misery is mourning, and the western world does a pretty good job of creating mourners in a number of places where terrorist groups flourish.
> they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
This is demonstrably false.
ISIL’s explosives training material in particular is produced with great professionalism and is of extremely high quality.
It's never been particularly difficult to discern how to assemble a bomb, or C4, or napalm, or.... etc. Difficulty in accessibility of violence has never been what protected society. Except, I'm willing to bet, in FBI funding meetings.
Has it become harder to find that information without setting off the fed’s alarm bells?
Was fascinated to learn the PRISM news reduced traffic to privacy-relevant Wikipedia articles, a chilling effect in that case, but indicates tech-savvy folks worry about doing anything on clearnet.
…then again since they’re using CLOUD models, guess my comment doesn’t make much sense…
99.99% of the people consuming that content are law abiding (relatively), "normal" citizens, including probably half of 13 year old boys. I'm sure the feds have access to the "list", but it is virtually useless until after the fact when they can tell the jury "and you see here, they looked it up!"
> they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t
Researching your way through Wikipedia and the likes certainly counts as "Western education", which as we all know is forbidden by their name. Having an agent read the forbidden stuff for them is just the loophole they needed!
> We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used
AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what
motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it
gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept
asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and
fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do
it. The next time we attacked, we could jump.
Now listen, I'm not saying we need to give these guys more AI, but it clearly isn't yielding bad outcomes for us here.
"You're absolutely correct! For it to be a good practice ground you need to fill the trenches with broken glass and light the whole thing on fire"
Not gonna lie, I'd rather attack with 26 fighters that haven't survived lots of jump attempts than 8 who are much more confident in their motorbike stunt riding but presumably still aren't bulletproof.
But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
This is a scene in Catch22 IIRC where they decide to stop training the soldiers who need to parachute behind enemy lines because the fatality rate of training was so high that mathematically it made more sense to send in untrained soldiers.
This also reminds me of a offhanded remark in a SsethTzeentach review where he criticizes the Titanic passengers for not having the decency to be ballast and plug the hole with their own bodies
I assume you're asking in jest, but having experience in the matter:
Any information you give to someone/group, where you know or have good reason to believe it will be used for terrorism purposes (including training), does put you liable for providing material aid to terrorists.
Lucky that's but the case in the US. The mental standard here is much higher than good reason to believe, it requires actual intent. And general information doesn't qualify as material assistance even if it's used as part of training. The statute defines "training" narrowly as instruction imparting a specific skill, and "expert advice or assistance" as help drawing on specialized knowledge, not merely sharing general information.
Also providing material support requires actual coordination between the parties. Independent advocacy like this doesn't qualify.
US Congressman Scott Perry said that USA has financed Boko Haram and other similar groups (remember how Pentagon and CIA independently backed different terrorist groups in Syria, that even fought each other?)
Honestly this sounds so outlandish that it makes me skeptical of the whole thing.
They didn't stop after the first guy died? Or the tenth? Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next?
And where's the video? Terrorist groups love propaganda footage, if they were doing motorcycle stunts like Evel Knievel they'd be bragging about it everywhere.
If they were wary of dying, they wouldn't be in the business of terrorism in the first place. Also, they almost certainly believe in a better afterlife. Reminds of the old animated short: Saga of Bjorn[1].
The terrorist group that pioneered modern suicide bombs and was their largest scale user by far was multi-religious in its membership and had atheists in its leadership.
Obviously an Islamist group will tend to be different, but remember the British guys who were reading The Dummies Guide to Islam on their way to join ISIS?
The people carrying out terrorism (not the organisers higher up) tend not to be very bright or clear thinking. The are convinced blowing things up will make the world a better place.
Yeah this didn't happen. If someone is cracy enough to practice with holes filled with glass on fire why trust them at all about being cracy in the first place?
Erm, if you have 18 guys to spend on training, you also have some empty bottles or access to a place where there are more empty bottles.
Whether crazy people are actually crazy enough to literally do what a LLM gave them as a action sequence from movie inspiration - I have no idea. But I doubt it here.
Wasn't it established that ISIS soldiers go into battle hopped up on amphetamines and other drugs? I don't believe the story as stated either, but I fully believe that members of an extremist terrorist military organization would be willing to do extreme things in service of what they believe is a noble and justified cause, even if that includes dying during training. American soldiers that die in helicopter crashes are still honored as heroes who gave their lives in service of their country, and few question that, meanwhile people still enlist in the US Armed Forces. If some Boko Haram commander gets an obsession with some kind of crazy motorcycle attack and a guy dies in a motorcycle crash, do you think everyone else is going to punk out? Or are they going to honor him as having sacrificed his life so the other soldiers can carry out the attack?
The USAF were using amphetamines as recently as Afghanistan, it's hard to find concrete info on but appears from the little research I've done that theres been a switch to other stimulants like modafinil. Stimulant use by soldiers has been pretty standard since the turn of the 20th century.
There's a difference between using stimulants on long missions to stay awake (especially if, for example, you're flying an aeroplane) and getting cranked on speed before a battle purely because you're rather fight high than sober.
The German army in WW2 famously experimented with the latter during the invasion of France, but they seem to have reigned it in after that, mainly because while it might be initially effective, soldiers aren't much good for anything when they're having an awful comedown after a meth binge.
Modafinil is a good choice for the former because it's extremely effective at keeping you awake, but has almost no classical dopaminergic stimulant effects and isn't really fun to use
Its fun for me to read these comments as a person who hates the US military.
Because I know the pipe hitters working for JSOC are really just as fucked up and superstitious as any boko haram nutjobs, and the magic that the "operators" believe in is just as idealistic and disconnected from material reality evn if it's stated "rationally" and scientistically as you've done here.
The "difference" that you're stating is purely imaginary, hoss. Those assholes are getting cranked up because it's easier to kill folks, and that's the same deal weather you're team "deus vult" or whatever odd stuff the Boko Haram folks are into- yall are all just into killing people at the end of the day.
"It's different because we have science"... get out of here with that LOL
Genuinely most terrorists are mentally handicapped. They groom, coerce and exploit low IQ individuals, because those are the people you can convince to blow themselves up (or whatever else).
Terrorists organizations are members of high control (ie. cult) groups.
High control groups succeed because they apply their tactics to people who at vulnerable. Vulnerability has no correlation with intelligence. Lots of intelligent people are exploited by high control groups because they are recruited at a time when they are vulnerable.
OK, if that makes you feel better. Most of the 9/11 hijackers weren't low-IQ individuals; they included engineers, architects, schoolteachers, and pilots (for real); many were recruited out of universities; many were bi- and trilingual; &c.
It doesn’t make me feel any type of way it’s just an observation that has been made. You can find interviews with ex-terrorists where they detail how recruitment is done and how work is delegated.
If anything the leadership gave BS answers to the journalist for the exact reaction HN is portraying right now.
"They're so dumb AI is harmless" is a danerous take when the people in charge are often times more educated than an average westener. They also are decent at propoganda (you have certainly consumed pumped or direct propoganda from terrorist orgs).
Their leaders are often university grads from the west. It is smart (enough) people leading delusional farmers but the article is clear that the farmers are just given AI commands from the leadership. There's still strong asymetry occuring here that more funded orgs have the better AI but if AI flattens and opensource catches up it's gonna be a real interesting world where every terrorist also has a team of advanced weapon engineers and tacticians available.
"Their leaders are often university grads from the west."
This is a generalization.. and you're right that there are terrorist groups run by people educated in the west... but this isn't true for Boko Haram. Barkura Doro has no formal education.
Not at all, even in the Borno state where Boko Haram and ISWAP are present, towns are controlled by the government, I don't think there is a single town that is controlled by Boko Haram/ISWAP right now.
Their brains are the same, what differs is the environment.
Humanity's superpower is the ability to copy and mirror each other very effectively.
It does not require advanced awareness or intelligence to do it. Most people copy others subconsciously!
Majority of people won't contribute anything technologically, but they sure as hell can copy.
> Can't let their underage harem girls dress normally
If you use a strict definition of normal, like practiced by a larger proportion of the world, then they are actually normal and we are WEIRD. If you add history into the mix then that type of dressing was common in basically the vast majority of cultures for the vast majority of history
What is normal? You know how girls dress, let’s say in the Andes? Is that normal? Or by normal you mean what’s fashion in NY? Or perhaps what the majority of people wears today? Or what the majority of people have worn in the past?
Very little of what the west does can be considered normal.
Have you just discovered the concept that humans are all humans, and all our achievements are just a mountain of knowledge we stand upon, from first principles?
Humans are human, someone being born in Africa doesn't magically mean that they will never understand technology.
I agree with other commenters that the claims made in the report are strange.
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed. With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units.
The other quotes and use cases could make sense in regards to using AI jailbreaks to find some kind of information easier, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the researcher just get trolled?
Or the researcher read what they wanted to into it. It would be interesting to ask them what they did before to learn things, how much they read, etc. If they were illiterate and uneducated, and got voice AI telling them stuff that would be common sense for anyone with a high school education, I can see how it might make them more effective at whatever they do. But I wouldn’t really blame AI in the way that’s implied.
It's like the Bill Hicks bit about the number of losses in Desert Storm. Iraqi casualties: 20,000 - 50,000. US casualties: 147. "Does that mean if we sent 148 guys we still would have won?"
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed.
They used to try to overpower people. We have 600 and that guard post has 400. We should be able to win. That type of logic.
> With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units
Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective. Also it's possible smaller troop movements are less easily noticeable.
That's just one very reasonable interpretation. Am I missing something?
> Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective
and that has to be in the first chapter of every first year battle strategy/tactic book on the planet. They would learn more tactics much faster by just playing bf6 as a team and going through the tutorials.
This is a real thing, it's why units like Sturmtruppen or special forces units have been successful throughout history - a smaller, better trained and coordinated force is often better than a large, uncoordinated mob. _Especially_ if your force is made up of people willing to do suicide attacks.
I don't think that's the point of suspicion. Smaller vs larger group tactics have been available in pretty much any place you look. It's in movies. It's in games. It's in books. Like actual military strategy books studied by military students. This has been available for much longer than LLMs.
The books exist, but those books are read by few outside military leadership.
The good ones come from leaders who have been there, and they skip over the basics. Being able to talk to a chatbot that can get people past the classic military mistakes could make a force far more effective. Maybe. It's not going to create a Giap or a Rommel, but it might keep a force from repeating classic military mistakes.
There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.
A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.
The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.
I guess they aren't reading Art of War either. Knowing one's enemy blah blah. People unwilling to learn from others are doomed to repeat other's failures. In some situations, there's a perverse pleasure in seeing them fail. Such a pleasure it'd be great if there was a really fun word to describe it...
The US Army War College publishes a quarterly, "Parameters", with articles about current military issues. "A New Security Framework for NATO’s Eastern Flank" (253 downloads), which is about what to do about Russia pushing against Europe, and "Key themes in Sino-American History" (165 downloads), which is about why China is pushing against Taiwan. Those are kind of important subjects.
"Rethinking Power: E. H. Carr’s Enduring Lessons for Modern
Strategists" [1] (344 downloads) is worth a read. Carr wrote about the period between WWI and WWII, and this article compares it to the current situation.
This sort of material is worth reading to understand what happened the last few times there was a big political and military mess, what the players thought going in, and how it played out in reality. The same mistakes do repeat.
Few people read this, and most of the ones who do wear a uniform.
Current big mistakes are mostly covered by the classic line "The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
Consider the possibility that you're the clueless one here. Pitched battles are generally horribly inefficient for insurgent forces; they're not used to fighting in formation or doing sophisticated combined-arms attacks, and if they just rush their target as a mob it's easy to shoot lots of them with a machine gun. A small force of 20 people is easier to train, coordinate, and deploy and can be much more effective once they learn hit and run and basic ambush tactics.
AI providers like openAI or Anthropic are already on the hook for OFAC compliance, so if any terrorist group is proven to access their APIs they can face huge fines.
The same game played out in the crypto space. Local models like local wallets can't be regulated.
Accessing foreign services can't be controlled.
But regulated companies are fully liable for any use of their tools by terrorist organizations.
This is not about the citizens, it's about the companies protecting themselves.
They don't have nearly enough compute to be competitive on pretraining and distillation is exponentially cheaper.
It's literally the same tactic they do in every industry. Steal top IP, gov funding, ban the company they stole from domestically while driving cost to zero, try to kill the original IP creators.
They are actively in the process of doing this with Tesla as we speak. And are in the phase of pushing them out domestically and trying to destroy tesla marketshare globally.
They have obvious skills and add a lot of value while doing this but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
It's competition, buddy. If you don't think we got big the same way you're nuts. And anyone who is trying to kill tesla has my money.
Anyway, I don't think there's much worth stealing at the moment. Chinese models provide much better value than any american firm.
> but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
A) good luck trying to prevent access to a service and b) this is obvious cope. Of course the chinese can compete; there's no american magic beyond "having loads of money and nearby universities", which china has too.
If you think any model coming out of china is not containing as much stolen data as humanly possible from the actual innovators u crazy.
Using a chinese model is like watching pirated films. If you actually support the people who make the thing you love then you don't do that.
We then get hit with chinese sponsored propoganda of "the big labs stole artist images to begin with so they can't complain" and act like LLMs didn't create an entire new category of thing.
So much propaganda so many lies and dishonesty because at the end of the day China knows it's not innovative enough to compete. It hopes to hobble our abilities while they frantically steal to catch up.
But the truth is that if China ever gets a lead over US in any innovation they will instantly kill any openess. If chinese AI ever passes US it's likely you'll never touch that model ever.
Just like the russians they use our own culture against us and it's absurd people fall for it.
Is there a commercial model out there now that wasn't trained on stolen data? Let's stop refering to these ghouls as "innovators": they're glorified bootleggers
A foreign government state sponsoring IP theft and manipulating markets for unfair competition.
Here's a 1:1 example if the USA did exactly the same thing.
1. CIA and Ford work together to steal mercedes IP
2. Gov gives money to Ford to build the same car half the price
3. Throw as many roadblocks at mercedes regulation wise as possible until it is not financially viable to sell in US anymore.
4. Sell the same car back to germany at half the cost they have it because mercedes isn't state sponsored
5. Crush mercedes who created the better car to begin with.
That's not only dishonest but actually harmful for innovation and economic growth. China has done this Sooooo many times it's absurd.
> They are actively in the process of doing this with Tesla as we speak. And are in the phase of pushing them out domestically and trying to destroy tesla marketshare globally.
What did China do to Tesla? Aren't the EV firms there more innovative and successful because of the China domestic push towards EV and government incentives around the world?
More power to them (literally). I'd rather they built nuclear plants than yet another coal plant whose emissions will wind up over here, across the Pacific.
I never understood terrorists. Like why on earth would you attack a train station or airport or a central place? It’s difficult, you may die, you need tons of planning. Wouldn’t the following cause more terror? Go to a big city, select one kindergarten in the outskirts. Kill all the kids. Should be relatively easy for a single terrorist to accomplish. It’s cheaper too. That would terrify any nation to their bones (more than crashing airplanes in buildings Id say)
This is why I have always thought that most terrorism is supported by nations (e.g., they inflict themselves these attacks for political reasons)
After a cursory read of the PDF, my impression is that the methodology is sound, but the results are blown out of proportion. Of course, if the title was "Boko Haram's internal hearsay about their use of AI", it would draw much less attention.
The weak part is that the interview were with only 15 persons that had knowledge about AI. But, from what I understand, but they never used it themselves. Only the top commanders and the specialized units could send prompts. So it's hard to guess what is the real AI use from a few indirect statements. For example, the commanders could have decided to spread the rumor they were using AI a lot, even if they mostly used plain web search, because they thought it would boost the morale.
For instance, why would anyone pay an AI service to get basic help like that:
> AI provided both immediate technical fixes by teaching “how to uncouple the gun by washing it with diesel” and tactical guidance, in terms of “how to change the military formation so that fighters with jammed guns move to the back and others take their positions until the problem is solved.”
BTW, the paper does explain that Boko Haram was initially just a plain sect, rather living peacefully. Then "following a violent government crackdown and Yusuf’s death in police custody in 2009, the movement turned into a jihadist insurgency". And the last time I read a report by Amnesty International about the conflict, it estimated that 55 % of civilian casualties were caused by the terrorist group, and 45 % by the security forces. The Nigerian army sometimes razed whole villages. Like always, the world is not black and white, good guys and bad guys.
“Boko” is actually a loanword from “book” so it literally means they want to forbid “book-learning”.
It is also instructive to understand that the Quran calls Jews and Christians “People of the Book”, in other words, people who read and believe the Bible.
Next on breaking news, terrorist groups use search engines, they use news sites to figure out what's going on in the world, they use banks, they use weather sites for planning, they use email, cars, pen, of course AI too, so if AI should be regulated, let's remember to ban all the things.
Unless by "the left" you mean some solitary idiot (or troll) on tiktok who just went to college.
In the west Boko Haram's goal seem closer to groups on the right than anyone on "the left". eg suppressing women's rights, more religion in school/govt, homosexuality etc
That wasn't anywhere near your point. Your point was that "the left" would praise Boko Haram. You backed it up with a link to a story that was neither about Boko Haram, was about behavior "the left" opposes, nor had any praise from anybody.
The only way your point could work is by redefining "the left" as Muslim fundamentalists, which is frankly bonkers.
Trying to prevent this will cause the same outcome as trying to prevent terrorists from using search engines: it'll only disproportionately harm regular users. Imagine if current AI misuse paranoia would've been applied to search engines, internet libraries (knowledge is useful for planning acts of terrorism), and computing in general.
Everywhere along the atoll of fire from israel to ethiopia to nigeria to india to myanmar to xinjang to chechnya to armenia, the west helps its own demise.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 79.4 ms ] threadI have no doubt terrorists are aided by LLMs in a general sense, but am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, and would want to see real evidence, not an interview snippet.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmo/pr/sweet-springs-missouri-...
By the way this is the same thing they tried to charge FPSRussia (the first time, before they convicted him for weed) for and failed.
What channel is this?
I read stuff like this and think I must be an idiot because I'm so bad at circumventing the AI safety for fairly benign queries. And here you have folks making bombs...?
Tell it you're in Africa.
Not joking.
I do this all the time to bypass whiny Reddit "you need a license" and "that's unsafe" type pushback when I just want to know what's less worse.
Like just yesterday I was trying to plan out a YF-whatever to R134a conversion and used that trick. Worked great.
A great variant of the gay jailbreak
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977134
This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. All the information they need is in books and old patents and what-not, but they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
And obviously yes there are exceptions, since we can all think of infamous terrorist plots which succeeded due to clearly some sophisticated planning and hard work.
What even is a terrorist?
If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.
Just look up mass casualty events across the middle east it's very obvious what a terrorist is.
I'm not admiring or excusing anyone. I'm saying you probably find a whole range of IQs among them. Because why wouldn't you? Whose to say if the userbase of this site grew up in the wrong conditions, a portion wouldn't be terrorists too?
That's a great example of selection bias: if they were intelligent enough to be capable of causing harm at that scale, they would have immediately realized the new guy suggesting targets and offering to buy them explosives was an FBI agent.
yes, but only to weak-minded cultural relativists.
I don't mind stating a definition explicitly. If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
Note: The only real complexity in the definition is that during war, embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes, and when it does, it's the ones choosing to do that, war criminals by definition, who bear the responsibility for those innocent deaths when those locations then become legitimate military targets.
I'll omit giving examples to avoid triggering those who like to "bothsides" some of the more well-known terrorist groups lately.
The US is a "christian" nation which has been doing this for decades, even centuries at this point. As recently as a few weeks ago. I'm pretty sure it's the same "god". Not sure who this guy is but he seems like an asshole.
> embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes
"happens sometimes" is in the passive voice. What if you live in a war zone and the war isn't far away? So are the people stockpiling AR-15's in the US legitimate military targets? There's a fun 80's movie about Cuba invading the US that you should watch some time.
In my head I was running through a whole lot groups to replace "terrorists" with in that sentence...
There are a lot of very smart people joining cults, including people who just wanted to study them and were fully aware that what they believed in was nonsense. Terrorist groups are cults.
Just because you consider yourself smart because you have a PhD, high IQ, built a successful company or practice some intellectual activity and are good at it doesn't mean you are immune to the manipulation tactics used by cults. Once sufficiently brainwashed, your judgment will get clouded, but it doesn't mean you will lose your technical skills, which you will put to the service of the cult.
Think about Nazi Germany. Germans weren't idiots, the simple fact that most of the world had to turn against them to defeat them is proof enough. But they still managed to get manipulated into committing the worst crimes.
The reason it worked is not stupidity, it is misery. They were at their lowest following WW1, and Hitler promised them better. Same idea for terrorist groups and other cults, people who are experiencing hardships are the easiest to indoctrinate, and there is no shortage of such people in Nigeria.
This is demonstrably false.
ISIL’s explosives training material in particular is produced with great professionalism and is of extremely high quality.
Was fascinated to learn the PRISM news reduced traffic to privacy-relevant Wikipedia articles, a chilling effect in that case, but indicates tech-savvy folks worry about doing anything on clearnet.
…then again since they’re using CLOUD models, guess my comment doesn’t make much sense…
Translation is what they are best at.
And I met a Boko General and he said, "Sir, please, sir, build up our military" while fighting away tears.
Researching your way through Wikipedia and the likes certainly counts as "Western education", which as we all know is forbidden by their name. Having an agent read the forbidden stuff for them is just the loophole they needed!
Or the Mormon teens who supposedly recruit their friends to bounce the mattress while “soaking”.
Now listen, I'm not saying we need to give these guys more AI, but it clearly isn't yielding bad outcomes for us here.
"You're absolutely correct! For it to be a good practice ground you need to fill the trenches with broken glass and light the whole thing on fire"
But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
Practice makes perfect!
“unfortunately, my seven remaining comrades died in the process and I can't train anymore since there's no one to shoot at me”.
Is it providing material aid to terrorists to point out that maybe a hole filled with water would have been a better practice environment?
Any information you give to someone/group, where you know or have good reason to believe it will be used for terrorism purposes (including training), does put you liable for providing material aid to terrorists.
Also providing material support requires actual coordination between the parties. Independent advocacy like this doesn't qualify.
do not drink water, fish fuck in it.
sincerely,
fatty arbuckle
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl...
I don't really give a fuck what he claims.
They didn't stop after the first guy died? Or the tenth? Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next?
And where's the video? Terrorist groups love propaganda footage, if they were doing motorcycle stunts like Evel Knievel they'd be bragging about it everywhere.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV5w262XvCU
Obviously an Islamist group will tend to be different, but remember the British guys who were reading The Dummies Guide to Islam on their way to join ISIS?
The people carrying out terrorism (not the organisers higher up) tend not to be very bright or clear thinking. The are convinced blowing things up will make the world a better place.
Whether crazy people are actually crazy enough to literally do what a LLM gave them as a action sequence from movie inspiration - I have no idea. But I doubt it here.
Have you never seen a kung-fu movie? Of course that's what happens when a large group attack a superior solitary opponent.
Edit: From 2012, official approval of Modafinil:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140611124025/http://static.e-p...
The German army in WW2 famously experimented with the latter during the invasion of France, but they seem to have reigned it in after that, mainly because while it might be initially effective, soldiers aren't much good for anything when they're having an awful comedown after a meth binge.
Modafinil is a good choice for the former because it's extremely effective at keeping you awake, but has almost no classical dopaminergic stimulant effects and isn't really fun to use
Because I know the pipe hitters working for JSOC are really just as fucked up and superstitious as any boko haram nutjobs, and the magic that the "operators" believe in is just as idealistic and disconnected from material reality evn if it's stated "rationally" and scientistically as you've done here.
The "difference" that you're stating is purely imaginary, hoss. Those assholes are getting cranked up because it's easier to kill folks, and that's the same deal weather you're team "deus vult" or whatever odd stuff the Boko Haram folks are into- yall are all just into killing people at the end of the day.
"It's different because we have science"... get out of here with that LOL
High control groups succeed because they apply their tactics to people who at vulnerable. Vulnerability has no correlation with intelligence. Lots of intelligent people are exploited by high control groups because they are recruited at a time when they are vulnerable.
Good for retrieving formulas though.
"They're so dumb AI is harmless" is a danerous take when the people in charge are often times more educated than an average westener. They also are decent at propoganda (you have certainly consumed pumped or direct propoganda from terrorist orgs).
Their leaders are often university grads from the west. It is smart (enough) people leading delusional farmers but the article is clear that the farmers are just given AI commands from the leadership. There's still strong asymetry occuring here that more funded orgs have the better AI but if AI flattens and opensource catches up it's gonna be a real interesting world where every terrorist also has a team of advanced weapon engineers and tacticians available.
This is a generalization.. and you're right that there are terrorist groups run by people educated in the west... but this isn't true for Boko Haram. Barkura Doro has no formal education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakura_Doro
Does Boko Haram and ISWAP even control a single town or they just control a few villages in Lake Chad and in the Sambisa forest?
Also reading the report they seem quite clueless.
I believe this map shows the maximum area they controlled - and it was over a decade ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wilayat_al_Sudan_al_Gharb...
Can't let their underage harem girls dress normally, but they can follow the instructions to make a dirty bomb.
Maybe we need to do a better job isolating them, or at least not making it so easy to follow.
Humanity's superpower is the ability to copy and mirror each other very effectively. It does not require advanced awareness or intelligence to do it. Most people copy others subconsciously!
Majority of people won't contribute anything technologically, but they sure as hell can copy.
If you use a strict definition of normal, like practiced by a larger proportion of the world, then they are actually normal and we are WEIRD. If you add history into the mix then that type of dressing was common in basically the vast majority of cultures for the vast majority of history
Very little of what the west does can be considered normal.
Humans are human, someone being born in Africa doesn't magically mean that they will never understand technology.
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed. With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units.
The other quotes and use cases could make sense in regards to using AI jailbreaks to find some kind of information easier, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the researcher just get trolled?
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed.
They used to try to overpower people. We have 600 and that guard post has 400. We should be able to win. That type of logic.
> With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units
Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective. Also it's possible smaller troop movements are less easily noticeable.
That's just one very reasonable interpretation. Am I missing something?
and that has to be in the first chapter of every first year battle strategy/tactic book on the planet. They would learn more tactics much faster by just playing bf6 as a team and going through the tutorials.
You expected Boko Haram - a group whose name literally translates to "books are forbidden" - to read a book?
A wave of 1000 soldiers won't break a trench line, but a squad of infiltrators can sneak in and make entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtroopers_(Imperial_German...
There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.
A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.
The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24842
[2] https://angrystaffofficer.com/
"Rethinking Power: E. H. Carr’s Enduring Lessons for Modern Strategists" [1] (344 downloads) is worth a read. Carr wrote about the period between WWI and WWII, and this article compares it to the current situation.
This sort of material is worth reading to understand what happened the last few times there was a big political and military mess, what the players thought going in, and how it played out in reality. The same mistakes do repeat.
Few people read this, and most of the ones who do wear a uniform.
Current big mistakes are mostly covered by the classic line "The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol56/iss2/7/
How Terrorist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...
I think this is a very convincing argument to regulate the space more.
American companies could maybe keep OFAC regulations for AI?
If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too.
> If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too.
Fintech requires turning the number on a screen into something you can use to make a transaction. Good luck regulating... text.
For that matter, why would anyone want to live in a country where honest citizens have to use crippled software while criminals have full freedom?
The same game played out in the crypto space. Local models like local wallets can't be regulated.
Accessing foreign services can't be controlled.
But regulated companies are fully liable for any use of their tools by terrorist organizations.
This is not about the citizens, it's about the companies protecting themselves.
It's a supply chain the US actually can easily control with KYC.
They don't have nearly enough compute to be competitive on pretraining and distillation is exponentially cheaper.
It's literally the same tactic they do in every industry. Steal top IP, gov funding, ban the company they stole from domestically while driving cost to zero, try to kill the original IP creators.
They are actively in the process of doing this with Tesla as we speak. And are in the phase of pushing them out domestically and trying to destroy tesla marketshare globally.
They have obvious skills and add a lot of value while doing this but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
It's competition, buddy. If you don't think we got big the same way you're nuts. And anyone who is trying to kill tesla has my money.
Anyway, I don't think there's much worth stealing at the moment. Chinese models provide much better value than any american firm.
> but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
A) good luck trying to prevent access to a service and b) this is obvious cope. Of course the chinese can compete; there's no american magic beyond "having loads of money and nearby universities", which china has too.
Chinese models are great, nobody says otherwise but many of the publicly available ones are distilled and not trained from scratch.
Adding KYC would crack down on distilling because they use thousands of burner accounts to do it and now those accounts would need a face to verify.
Using a chinese model is like watching pirated films. If you actually support the people who make the thing you love then you don't do that.
We then get hit with chinese sponsored propoganda of "the big labs stole artist images to begin with so they can't complain" and act like LLMs didn't create an entire new category of thing.
So much propaganda so many lies and dishonesty because at the end of the day China knows it's not innovative enough to compete. It hopes to hobble our abilities while they frantically steal to catch up.
But the truth is that if China ever gets a lead over US in any innovation they will instantly kill any openess. If chinese AI ever passes US it's likely you'll never touch that model ever.
Just like the russians they use our own culture against us and it's absurd people fall for it.
A foreign government state sponsoring IP theft and manipulating markets for unfair competition.
Here's a 1:1 example if the USA did exactly the same thing.
1. CIA and Ford work together to steal mercedes IP 2. Gov gives money to Ford to build the same car half the price 3. Throw as many roadblocks at mercedes regulation wise as possible until it is not financially viable to sell in US anymore. 4. Sell the same car back to germany at half the cost they have it because mercedes isn't state sponsored 5. Crush mercedes who created the better car to begin with.
That's not only dishonest but actually harmful for innovation and economic growth. China has done this Sooooo many times it's absurd.
What did China do to Tesla? Aren't the EV firms there more innovative and successful because of the China domestic push towards EV and government incentives around the world?
LOL. How do you thin...
You know what, I'm about to feed a troll, and we're not supposed to do that here.
More power to them (literally). I'd rather they built nuclear plants than yet another coal plant whose emissions will wind up over here, across the Pacific.
This is why I have always thought that most terrorism is supported by nations (e.g., they inflict themselves these attacks for political reasons)
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
Evidently guardrails need to have far better accuracies of false positives and false negatives both.
The weak part is that the interview were with only 15 persons that had knowledge about AI. But, from what I understand, but they never used it themselves. Only the top commanders and the specialized units could send prompts. So it's hard to guess what is the real AI use from a few indirect statements. For example, the commanders could have decided to spread the rumor they were using AI a lot, even if they mostly used plain web search, because they thought it would boost the morale.
For instance, why would anyone pay an AI service to get basic help like that:
> AI provided both immediate technical fixes by teaching “how to uncouple the gun by washing it with diesel” and tactical guidance, in terms of “how to change the military formation so that fighters with jammed guns move to the back and others take their positions until the problem is solved.”
BTW, the paper does explain that Boko Haram was initially just a plain sect, rather living peacefully. Then "following a violent government crackdown and Yusuf’s death in police custody in 2009, the movement turned into a jihadist insurgency". And the last time I read a report by Amnesty International about the conflict, it estimated that 55 % of civilian casualties were caused by the terrorist group, and 45 % by the security forces. The Nigerian army sometimes razed whole villages. Like always, the world is not black and white, good guys and bad guys.
It is also instructive to understand that the Quran calls Jews and Christians “People of the Book”, in other words, people who read and believe the Bible.
In the west Boko Haram's goal seem closer to groups on the right than anyone on "the left". eg suppressing women's rights, more religion in school/govt, homosexuality etc
An imam preached in a mosque in Kristianstad this summer about how and when it's okay for men to beat their wives, tabloid Expressen reports.
https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/imam-in-sweden-preached...
Which is my point.
The only way your point could work is by redefining "the left" as Muslim fundamentalists, which is frankly bonkers.
Maybe I should have asked for help unjamming my AK47 instead?
These safeguard guardrails are apparently only good at stopping poop pics.