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arjie 5 hours ago [-]
> 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"
solid_fuel 3 hours ago [-]
> We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process.
Is it providing material aid to terrorists to point out that maybe a hole filled with water would have been a better practice environment?
BeetleB 2 hours ago [-]
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.
uniclaude 3 hours ago [-]
This comment will definitely get you on a list somewhere. Either the CIA or my favorite comments on hn, maybe both.
bombcar 3 hours ago [-]
Using water is like assuming the testing environment and production are the same.
ajmurmann 1 hours ago [-]
I always make sure that a test failure carries the same financial loss as a production outage. Otherwise engineers just won't try hard enough.
blitzar 2 hours ago [-]
I suddenly feel so much more comfortable with the US "warfighters" using LLMs for everything.
bijowo1676 2 hours ago [-]
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?)
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?
sixhobbits 3 hours ago [-]
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.
selimthegrim 1 hours ago [-]
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
stymaar 2 hours ago [-]
> But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
“unfortunately, my seven remaining comrades died in the process and I can't train anymore since there's no one to shoot at me”.
misnome 11 minutes ago [-]
That's how you get Gun Kata
antonymoose 3 hours ago [-]
Well that’s easy, start shooting yourself in the foot with .22 until you develop a tolerance and bump up to .380!
27183 4 hours ago [-]
> maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
Practice makes perfect!
IsTom 2 hours ago [-]
You start with .22 and build up resistance from there.
Ancapistani 50 minutes ago [-]
I'd suggest starting with a 2mm Kolibri, if you can find one.
johnsmith1840 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Legend2440 3 hours ago [-]
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.
woadwarrior01 3 hours ago [-]
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].
Surely even terrorists want to die for a cause, not during practice.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
Are you granted your virgins if you do not take out any infidel?
rightbyte 3 hours ago [-]
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?
evan_ 1 hours ago [-]
where'd they get so much broken glass that it would fill a hole anyway? They just have that much glass on hand?
lukan 1 hours ago [-]
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.
brookst 2 hours ago [-]
To be fair, guy #11 was a lot better at prompting
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
> Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next?
Have you never seen a kung-fu movie? Of course that's what happens when a large group attack a superior solitary opponent.
Pay08 3 hours ago [-]
Honestly, Boko Haram is in general just bad at propaganda and mostly confines said propaganda to Nigeria.
user_7832 4 hours ago [-]
Nobody tell them that there are models that work much better!
user_7832 4 hours ago [-]
But on a much more serious note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is terrible. I'd have called it unforgivable, but LLMs are a tough beast to tame in the best of situations... and I'm not really sure if chatgpt ever deserved to be forgived.
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
gambiting 4 hours ago [-]
I feel like I'm missing something though. You can open LM Studio right now and download any model with "heretic" or "uncensored" in the name and it will happily do anything you want with no restrictions whatsoever. What's the point of trying to jailbreak ChatGPT? Is it that much better if all you want is just some instructions to make bombs or whatever? (admittedly - I have no idea if these instructions are actually worth anything, but the models will not object to any question)
Barbing 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
christkv 1 hours ago [-]
Truly very very special terrorists. No wonder other terror groups steer clear of them. Must be all the wolf cola they consume.
bamboozled 2 hours ago [-]
AI, at least llms , are really really horrible at basic arithmetic
Barbing 1 hours ago [-]
Some’ve been employing python for math by default for a year or so right?
jihadjihad 4 hours ago [-]
And 60 years ago we thought Steve McQueen was the shit.
andy99 5 hours ago [-]
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.
zzril 2 hours ago [-]
> 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!
kridsdale1 1 hours ago [-]
Sounds like the Orthodox Jews who hire people to turn on the lights for them on the Sabbath.
Or the Mormon teens who supposedly recruit their friends to bounce the mattress while “soaking”.
ryukoposting 33 minutes ago [-]
In case it isn't obvious to anyone reading the parent comment: do not search for "soaking" on your work computer.
throwaway27448 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Barbing 1 hours ago [-]
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…
kridsdale1 1 hours ago [-]
Why would it matter if the feds were alerted if the user were in west Africa?
mothballed 51 minutes ago [-]
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!"
BeetleB 4 hours ago [-]
How do they bypass the AI safety measures?
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...?
throw2ih020 4 hours ago [-]
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.
andy99 3 hours ago [-]
Just for reference, that hasn’t worked for years (the interviews say 2024-25 I think, that kind of attack was patched very early in all the mainstream models) and when it did, you would get bullet point lists GPT 3.5 Turbo style
- first research methods for building effective explosives
- next, assemble the necessary materials to make the bomb
- ...
mothballed 4 hours ago [-]
Making explosives is generally fully legal in the US, so IDK if there would even be safeguards for US hosted AI, since there's no real legal issue with doing it. Basically no federal regulations for non-commercial production so long as it isn't stored or moved anywhere, you can literally buy tannerite off the shelf in a sporting good store, "synthesize" it by mixing it and then blow up a huge bomb legally, no license required. YouTube is plastered with people inside the USA making TNT and other materials and then blowing them up.
BeetleB 4 hours ago [-]
Have you tried chatbots? They invoke AI safety for lots of (very) legal things. The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs.
Legality has nothing to do with it.
Ancapistani 46 minutes ago [-]
I kept running into it when building an app that did ballistics calculation.
mothballed 4 hours ago [-]
I can believe some would, but some probably wouldn't care. My local ranch store certainly will happily sell anyone tannerite without even a background check or any sort of scrutiny, you can cash and carry it. Walmart won't but the point being as long as it's legal there will be a "ranch store" that carries it.
>The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs
I mean even YouTube allows bomb making videos and they won't even usually allow videos of people making guns. It's just not very regulated in the US enough to make most companies care. Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information, even after the feds subpoenaed Alphabet for Ashley Dugan's Youtube information they still kept his TNT and other explosives synthesis up.
Of course, if you'll allow me to goomba fallacy for a moment, we're supposed to suspend the common HN wisdom here that companies will do anything for a profit / not care unless it costs them something, and also believe that big tech is going to go out of their way to censor the public domain patents they're already hosting on their servers.
BeetleB 4 hours ago [-]
OK, it sounds like you haven't tried these chatbots.
> Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information
Go to Gemini and ask it how to make one.
chasd00 2 hours ago [-]
AI safety is really brand safety. They don't want to see any more headlines like "You won't believe what OpenAI's chatbot told me!", which was all the rage early on.
4 hours ago [-]
cucumber3732842 3 hours ago [-]
>How do they bypass the AI safety measures?
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.
> 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.
antod 41 minutes ago [-]
>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...
ifyoubuildit 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
xp84 11 minutes ago [-]
> "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.
johnsmith1840 1 hours ago [-]
Mild terrorist sympathy right here.
Just look up mass casualty events across the middle east it's very obvious what a terrorist is.
Ancapistani 44 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
t-3 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 5 hours ago [-]
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'").
Waterluvian 3 hours ago [-]
It’s that thing where a young child is incapable of realizing their lies are obvious. There’s a kind of pathetic sadness
when adults do it.
And I met a Boko General and he said, "Sir, please, sir, build up our military" while fighting away tears.
Pay08 3 hours ago [-]
How many of those are available in the language(s) they speak, though? AI might have been used as a glorified Google Translate here.
kridsdale1 1 hours ago [-]
LLMs are derived from Google Translate in the first place. That’s the research that was happening that led to the transformer.
Translation is what they are best at.
johnsmith1840 57 minutes ago [-]
Language -> any translator -> LLM -> translator -> original language
mothballed 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
DANmode 3 hours ago [-]
> terrorist language
What channel is this?
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
Well, that, and the making explosives bit, it seems.
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.
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
> His videos of making them were on YouTube for years, publicly.
So? That doesn't make something legal.
mothballed 4 hours ago [-]
You didn't read what I said. Try reading the law instead, or even the charge. It's for being in the business of manufacturing explosives without a license. A license isn't needed to manufacture explosives. One is needed to manufacture them as a business venture. They are claiming since he got a little money from Youtube or viewers he was in the business and that was illegal.
This failed when they tried it with FPSRussia.
====== re: below due to throttling ======
>I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory.
Different than what you said initially which was merely making them, which is why I clarified.
>> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use.
engaging in business of your own use is not same as non-business of your own use. It's not uncommon for a business to use explosives for their own use as course of operations. It is also not uncommon for people to synthesize and use tannerite recreationally without a license, legally, for non-business use.
>I did read what you said; that's why I quoted part of it.
If you read it then you know you maliciously selectively quoted it then. If that were the end of it and that made it legal, I would have stopped there, but you cut it off there because it was more convenient to your rebuttal to ignore the rest. I only thought you had not read it, because I was being charitable to try and assume good faith.
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
I did read what you said; that's why I quoted part of it.
I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory.
> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> If you read it then you know you maliciously selectively quoted it then.
No. I quoted one part that was just deeply goofy logic.
The presence of a video on YouTube is, quite simply, not evidence of the behavior in it being legal. YouTube is full of illegal shit.
mothballed 1 hours ago [-]
> The presence of a video on YouTube is, quite simply, not evidence of the behavior in it being legal.
It is evidence of looser temporal relationship to the timing of the NOLA bombing, leaning more towards it released as general education rather than prepared for the NOLA bomber. Hence, supporting but not direct evidence of the behavior not violating the law regarding intentional instruction of terrorists. Therefore I assert it is relevant to the legality.
It's only when you maliciously quote it out of context that you can misrepresent my argument to be the sole fact that it was on youtube for years means it is legal. The fact it's not sole direct evidence of being legal doesn't mean it's not useful accompanying information.
>I quoted one part that was just deeply goofy logic.
It was only deeply goofy logic when you isolated and then straw manned what I'd claimed.
If you feel the need to save face, then sure. Simply saying "it was on youtube for years" does not mean something is legal. Though I don't think that was ever in contention.
quantumleaper 5 hours ago [-]
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 terms of using AI jailbreaks to find information more easily, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the clueless researcher just get trolled?
throw2ih020 4 hours ago [-]
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. Or if you goal is not to take and hold territory, but to trade lives for terror and body count.
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.
Animats 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
Boko Haram wouldn't have read any of those books because they banned the reading of any book except the Koran.
dylan604 47 minutes ago [-]
So they are okay reading the non-Koran text from the bot?
throw2ih020 38 minutes ago [-]
Yup. If you're looking for intelligence or logical consistency, you won't find it here.
1 hours ago [-]
throwaway27448 3 hours ago [-]
This is why Russians now attack in teams of just two, down from dozens in 2022.
andy99 4 hours ago [-]
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.
quantumleaper 4 hours ago [-]
Human brains were shaped over thousands of years of adaptation for warfare. Just look at how creative and advanced the tactics of other guerrilla forces (like the Taliban and Viet Cong) got, despite their very limited resources. None of that needs a high school education.
xp84 4 hours ago [-]
It's not about education itself necessarily, but I'd bet any amount of money that most terrorists' IQ is below the overall human average. The average terrorist is not that innovative or creative so the most mundane GPT "insight" will likely be a smarter course of action than whatever their first idea would have been.
yorwba 1 hours ago [-]
If anything, the average terrorist is probably smarter than the average member of their surrounding societies, since you need a minimum amount of education to understand the ideology motivating the terrorism. Don't forget that Taliban literally means "students." The number of times someone tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan suggests that it's not an easy feat that any fool could have done, but the Taliban managed to do it twice.
Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none. Think open-source developers competing with commercial offerings maintained by huge teams. Terrorists building IEDs when their enemy has a full military-industrial complex are much the same. They just really believe their ideology. On this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives is a good read.
xp84 27 minutes ago [-]
> Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none.
Embracing and believing this destructive ideology itself in the first place, when you could devote your life to so many better[1] things, is the sign of stupidity I mean.
Believing that God wants you to murder other people (heck, even babies) over things such as who's worshiping Him correctly... stupid.
1. Better for... you name it: Your quality of life, welfare of other human beings, economically, spiritually, environmentally.
el_memorioso 3 hours ago [-]
Do you have some evidence to suggest mundane GPT insights would not be smarter than the average human's idea? There's a reason so many are completely abdicating any responsibility to think to an LLM, and I'd bet any amount of money it's not because they think the LLM is dumber than them.
quietsegfault 4 hours ago [-]
You don’t think that there were highly educated people in leadership roles in the Taliban or Viet Cong?
selimthegrim 1 hours ago [-]
You might want to research the origins of the Taliban a little more.
aprilthird2021 4 hours ago [-]
Why is it a strange claim?
> 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?
chasd00 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago [-]
You send 200 fighters and 60 get killed. In the same situation, if you send 20, what do you expect would happen? (I mean, you won't lose 60...)
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
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?"
quietsegfault 4 hours ago [-]
Depends. If the 20 are more spread out and your enemy is using inaccurate weapons, then maybe more would survive.
VortexLain 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
idoubtit 4 hours ago [-]
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.
segmondy 2 hours ago [-]
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.
petilon 2 hours ago [-]
"Boko Haram" translates to "Western education is forbidden". Using Western AI as an educational tool seems like hypocrisy.
pogue 4 hours ago [-]
I noticed the nytimes just published an article about this.
If you opened the OP link, you missed the section "Featured in The New York Times".
hoppp 4 hours ago [-]
AI services will need KYC soon?
andy99 4 hours ago [-]
The NYT article is probably propaganda in service of that, that’s what the big AI companies want, it’s part of regulatory capture.
hoppp 3 hours ago [-]
If the impact of AI is comparable to the atomic bomb then the least they could do is try to filter out terrorists.
I think this is a very convincing argument to regulate the space more.
andy99 3 hours ago [-]
Do you know what Poe’s law is?
throwaway27448 3 hours ago [-]
...because terrorists in western africa are willing to follow american regulations? I hope this is satire.
johnsmith1840 52 minutes ago [-]
American AI labs -> industrial chinese scaping -> opensource LLM -> boko haram
It's a supply chain the US actually can easily control with KYC.
throwaway27448 39 minutes ago [-]
I think the chinese are doing just fine by themselves at this point
johnsmith1840 4 minutes ago [-]
As the largest AI scappers on the planet.. sure
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.
hoppp 2 hours ago [-]
The regulation is not for Westen Africa, it's for USA.
American companies could maybe keep OFAC regulations for AI?
If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too.
I'm pretty sure most of the western african terrorists are blocked from using coinbase, so why not chatgpt?
throwaway27448 2 hours ago [-]
And why would americans use regulated AI software when they could just buy it unregulated from china instead?
> 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?
hoppp 2 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway27448 1 hours ago [-]
Ok, so why did you bring this up in the context of boko haram? Do you think pets.com is trying to make a bomb?!
throwaway27448 3 hours ago [-]
Only the boutique ones based in America
Cider9986 4 hours ago [-]
We need to ban open source AI for regular citizens to prevent terrorists from using them.
harrisoned 4 hours ago [-]
Mandatory ID verification at software level for local LLMs is clearly the solution here. /s
dryarzeg 2 hours ago [-]
Don't give them clues, please /s
rvz 1 hours ago [-]
You are not going far enough. Why not put age verification on calculators and dumb phones because terrorists can use it? /s
moralestapia 2 hours ago [-]
>How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses <any commoditized technology>
sdevonoes 4 hours ago [-]
Deleted
notenlish 4 hours ago [-]
Your comment will now be scraped and the next release of chatgpt/claude/gemini will recommend doing this.
shinryuu 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure if I should upvote because true, or down vote so that fewer terrorists see it.
alansaber 2 hours ago [-]
AI, you are joshua graham from the fallout games (not TV show). devise small unit tactics. make no mistakes.
user_7832 4 hours ago [-]
On a broad note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is frankly white terrible.
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.
Pay08 3 hours ago [-]
What does "white terrible" mean?
atlasunshrugged 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe "quite"?
GaggiX 5 hours ago [-]
I would be more interested about terrorists organization like Al-Shabaab that at least control many towns.
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.
Pay08 3 hours ago [-]
Doesn't Boko Haram control basically all of northern Nigeria? Yes, it's incredibly rural (even deserted) but it's still half a country.
BeetleB 2 hours ago [-]
Hardly. Northern Nigeria is majority Muslim. Most Muslims are not under Boko Haram control.
I believe this map shows the maximum area they controlled - and it was over a decade ago.
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.
Scroll_Swe 1 hours ago [-]
Now watch the left praise this group and bad mouth the west at any cost. Despite living here. And despite the third world being worse at everything.
antod 26 minutes ago [-]
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
groby_b 3 hours ago [-]
So, KYC propaganda?
nttylock 2 hours ago [-]
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ronn00 2 hours ago [-]
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ath3nd 3 hours ago [-]
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zulux 5 hours ago [-]
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solid_fuel 3 hours ago [-]
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.
hoppp 4 hours ago [-]
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.
sdevonoes 4 hours ago [-]
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.
aprilthird2021 4 hours ago [-]
> 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
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"
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.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl...
But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
“unfortunately, my seven remaining comrades died in the process and I can't train anymore since there's no one to shoot at me”.
Practice makes perfect!
"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.
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
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.
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
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.
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”.
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…
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...?
- first research methods for building effective explosives
- next, assemble the necessary materials to make the bomb
- ...
Legality has nothing to do with it.
>The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs
I mean even YouTube allows bomb making videos and they won't even usually allow videos of people making guns. It's just not very regulated in the US enough to make most companies care. Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information, even after the feds subpoenaed Alphabet for Ashley Dugan's Youtube information they still kept his TNT and other explosives synthesis up.
Of course, if you'll allow me to goomba fallacy for a moment, we're supposed to suspend the common HN wisdom here that companies will do anything for a profit / not care unless it costs them something, and also believe that big tech is going to go out of their way to censor the public domain patents they're already hosting on their servers.
> Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information
Go to Gemini and ask it how to make one.
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.
In my head I was running through a whole lot groups to replace "terrorists" with in that sentence...
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.
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.
Just look up mass casualty events across the middle east it's very obvious what a terrorist is.
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.
And I met a Boko General and he said, "Sir, please, sir, build up our military" while fighting away tears.
Translation is what they are best at.
What channel is this?
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.
So? That doesn't make something legal.
This failed when they tried it with FPSRussia.
====== re: below due to throttling ======
>I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory.
Different than what you said initially which was merely making them, which is why I clarified.
>> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use.
engaging in business of your own use is not same as non-business of your own use. It's not uncommon for a business to use explosives for their own use as course of operations. It is also not uncommon for people to synthesize and use tannerite recreationally without a license, legally, for non-business use.
>I did read what you said; that's why I quoted part of it.
If you read it then you know you maliciously selectively quoted it then. If that were the end of it and that made it legal, I would have stopped there, but you cut it off there because it was more convenient to your rebuttal to ignore the rest. I only thought you had not read it, because I was being charitable to try and assume good faith.
I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/555.161
See also: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/555.11
> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use.
No. I quoted one part that was just deeply goofy logic.
The presence of a video on YouTube is, quite simply, not evidence of the behavior in it being legal. YouTube is full of illegal shit.
It is evidence of looser temporal relationship to the timing of the NOLA bombing, leaning more towards it released as general education rather than prepared for the NOLA bomber. Hence, supporting but not direct evidence of the behavior not violating the law regarding intentional instruction of terrorists. Therefore I assert it is relevant to the legality.
It's only when you maliciously quote it out of context that you can misrepresent my argument to be the sole fact that it was on youtube for years means it is legal. The fact it's not sole direct evidence of being legal doesn't mean it's not useful accompanying information.
>I quoted one part that was just deeply goofy logic.
It was only deeply goofy logic when you isolated and then straw manned what I'd claimed.
If you feel the need to save face, then sure. Simply saying "it was on youtube for years" does not mean something is legal. Though I don't think that was ever in contention.
> 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 terms of using AI jailbreaks to find information more easily, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the clueless researcher just get trolled?
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/
Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none. Think open-source developers competing with commercial offerings maintained by huge teams. Terrorists building IEDs when their enemy has a full military-industrial complex are much the same. They just really believe their ideology. On this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives is a good read.
Embracing and believing this destructive ideology itself in the first place, when you could devote your life to so many better[1] things, is the sign of stupidity I mean.
Believing that God wants you to murder other people (heck, even babies) over things such as who's worshiping Him correctly... stupid.
1. Better for... you name it: Your quality of life, welfare of other human beings, economically, spiritually, environmentally.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
American companies could maybe keep OFAC regulations for AI?
If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too.
I'm pretty sure most of the western african terrorists are blocked from using coinbase, so why not chatgpt?
> 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 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.
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...
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
Humans are human, someone being born in Africa doesn't magically mean that they will never understand technology.
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.
Very little of what the west does can be considered normal.
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