AI-Powered Surveillance: The Game No One Admits Playing

Turns out, AI isn’t just making deepfakes and writing poetry. It’s also debugging surveillance tools that governments conveniently pretend don’t exist.

OpenAI uncovered a Chinese AI-powered surveillance tool designed to monitor anti-China sentiment on Western social media. The discovery came when someone involved used OpenAI’s models to debug the system’s code, an ironic twist in digital espionage.

Researchers believe the tool is based on Meta’s open-source AI model, Llama, raising concerns about how freely available AI tech can be weaponized.

• AI enables real-time surveillance, tracking global conversations.
• It also fuels disinformation, generating content that criticizes Chinese dissidents.
• Western AI models are being repurposed, sometimes against their creators.

Beyond China, OpenAI also flagged campaigns in Cambodia using AI to fuel financial scams. This raises the question: If AI can power surveillance and deception at scale, how do we ensure transparency and accountability?

Read the full article on NY Times.

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