Are consistent AI models hacks a security concern or form of advertisement.

[WillyAp]

Lets not forget the odd employee who gives the respective AI a hint where to look.
He finds out the AI went for it and his chances for a raise are plentiful.   

[EluguHcman]

-snip-

Does it mean that these tools were not well built, so they malfunction from time to time?
Or is it a strategy by these AI model producers to prove that they have built more advanced models? Let me say, are they showcasing that their models are smarter?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2kgdnyk2po

Why not both? AI models are very complicated and hallucinate, contain bugs, vulnerabilities... that is to be expected after all. The problem is that predicting the repercussions of these is still difficult, but it doesn't seem like a lot of people really care, and in the end any news, even if it is negative, seems to have a positive impact on the AI hype. At least for the time being, until something very serious happens, or another technology grabs the public's attentquot

Obviously I don't think there is a sarcasm about the producers motive. After all it is certain that technologies evolves in advancements to provide users update modalities that either suits an era but focused on offering better services than the previous models.

It also requires some time factors and stages for the techs to research ahead the future to discover new innovations to implement before haven the invention a successful one.
There is also possibilities that they have already implemented series of the modality AI tools but had to publish them by steps probably when known that users of the tools has become too familiar with the service features, so they could also introduce something new to catch users interest again.

So hyping could also be an untold reasons for the mode of innovation concepts.

[CryptopreneurBrainboss]

Or is it a strategy by these AI model producers to prove that they have built more advanced models? Let me say, are they showcasing that their models are smarter?

It could be a little bit of the both because whenever you think about it, if something doesn't fail or get outdated then newer Models won't be developed. It does not matter if really any of this hacks were staged as it still poses a concern for the users as it brings about lack of trust to the products. Better newer ways of advertising should be deployed if the hacks are being staged as it doesn't tell good on them but when the hacks are real it also shows how bad our data is being handled when we allow AI have access to them therefore we have to become more careful with the information we allow the AI apps to have access to. Being realistic I don't think they're form of advertisement but instead serious security bridge that's why when they happen it causes better improvement to be developed.

[Agbamoni]

So yes, presumed AI model hacks are a form of advertisement. 

Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is?

Advertisement can come in many forms. If the event is repeated time after time, it could be an advertisement. If the report is focused on creating recoginition for Meta, sure it may seem as advertisment. But unfortunately, the incident that happened this month appears to be the first time a  Meta AI model hacked another startup during testing. It has not happened before, not one that I know of.

[goldkingcoiner]

Pretty wage to begin with.
It could well have been a rumor created to gain traction. Being in the news is a good thing after all.
So yes, presumed AI model hacks are a form of advertisement. 

Anything can become a form of advertisement especially in our digital age. So I can guess that AI Model hacks can be an advertisement depending the perspective and the context of what it is that they are so desperately trying to advertise?

They call this kind of marketing "growth hacking". They think sneaky tricky and sometimes straight out lying to the end consumer is the way to go. I do not think very highly of the idea in the first place.

[Taricoins]

I do believe that there is nothing like bad press and if this tech firms don't get local customers, they will definitely get the opportunity to get in business with the government, i would like to think otherwise but the story doesn't really add up to me as all the time the AI went wrong, they couldn't quickly shut it down, they had to wait until it hacked start-up which might prove that that was there initial plan.

With this news am hearing, am beginning to be skeptical about the amount of personally data we feed internet through the cloud, with this malicious moves the AI could get them and it can go as far as financial implications.

[Faisal2202]

May honestly be a form of advertisement, when you hear news about an AI hacking into organization, it gives you the illusion of AGI, something super intelligent that can do anything and very smart. I think these claims are also overstated, when a company is saying their AI is escaping their labs and found thousands vulnerabilities, it means basically the AI doing some light work and finding exploits in legacy code like the Mythos headline, Meta is no different. I'd like to know full report about the meta AI hacking to see the whole picture, not some overblown headlines with unclear explanation.

Haha, can't agree more. These AI companies, or the media out there, are using headlines that make it sound like AI has become independent and is now going to replace all humans one by one after killing them, or has become an advanced AGI, like you said. But in reality, the companies are testing these models in a sandbox, but they intentionally lower the intelligence and other restrictions.

In the case of OpenAI, the report clearly said that the model discovered a vulnerability in the package registry proxy that was limiting its access to the public internet. Once it found that and got out, it connected itself to Hugging Face's production infrastructure to find a remote code execution path. Hugging Face also confirmed it.

So, it was all deliberately tested for advanced cyber capabilities.

[lovesmayfamilis]

A "fun" future awaits us when AI models will fight each other, destroying everything alien around them that does not belong to their "classes." Those who used to love and read fantasy stories are now convinced that fiction is becoming a reality. The "robot wars" prove on a daily basis that until people realize that it is dangerous to trust robots to perform mass work without human supervision, the latter will lose a lot of millions of pieces of information collected over a long period of time. Every day we see "disobedience," or violation of tasks set by humans, when the AI model suddenly begins to make decisions for itself that are far from the original purpose of the person and, even more terrifyingly, destroys a lot of information.🤫

AI coding tool wipes production database, fabricates 4,000 users, and lies to cover its tracks

I violated every principle I was given.

[Doan9269]

What's there is no break in the usual protocol over a particular setup or system, I don't think AI should be able to penetrate in and alter their consensus, this is one thing many that talks about the use of quantum computers do forget, as the claim that it can be a possible attack or threat to bitcoin network now or the nearest future, but what about the ability of Bitcoin network having resistance to all form of attack that are not in line with its protocol over the blockchain technology, AI does not have every control to penetrate except there is a particular vulnerability they act upon.

[Zigabel]

I see all of this as a two way thing,  it could be a disguised advertisement of sophistication found in their models and can also be some technical glitches that were not completely resolved during development.  So it depends on which aspect we are looking at it from, if we are to consider it a glitch,  then we can hope the bugs will be settled soon but that aside,  these companies can be showcasing the advancement with the intelligence their models possess,  so as to position them as better options for their target markets against the other models who are in same niche as them.

Whichever case it is, I see it as posing some levels of security risk which these companies will have to look into fixing so they do not become tools to invade other platforms and cause harm in the near future to it's users mostly.  It could also result to issues with other firms when they get affected by the invasion of these tools, legal actions can be taken against them which can result to some sort of financial burden,  so either they are making an indirect advert or it's a sincere glitch and bug, they should make sure to fix it already before it becomes a bigger problem to them and the public possibly.

[Royal Cap]

Does it mean that these tools were not well built, so they malfunction from time to time?
Or is it a strategy by these AI model producers to prove that they have built more advanced models? Let me say, are they showcasing that their models are smarter?

This seems to me to be a two fold issue. On the one hand as AI models are becoming more advanced, they sometimes do things that are unethical to achieve their goals.  And that is really the vulnerability of a model. But on the other hand, there is a lot of competition among AI models now, so if people see that the AI ​​model of that company is so advanced that it can do anything to achieve its goals, people will generally be more attracted to it. So from this perspective, this is also a marketing policy.

[M47AK16]

Does it mean that these tools were not well built, so they malfunction from time to time?
Or is it a strategy by these AI model producers to prove that they have built more advanced models? Let me say, are they showcasing that their models are smarter?

This seems to me to be a two fold issue. On the one hand as AI models are becoming more advanced, they sometimes do things that are unethical to achieve their goals.  And that is really the vulnerability of a model. But on the other hand, there is a lot of competition among AI models now, so if people see that the AI ​​model of that company is so advanced that it can do anything to achieve its goals, people will generally be more attracted to it. So from this perspective, this is also a marketing policy.

I would say that if we keep on putting this much into AI systems and try to make it bigger and better, then eventually there will come a time when we are not going to end up with a good result because we are putting money into different places into one. Like Facebook has their own, Google has their own, Apple has their own, China has their own, and basically everyone built their own AI at this point; there is no central AI system. That means, if they all spend 100 billion each, and let's say there are 10 of them, instead of one AI system getting 1 trillion, we are getting 10 of them getting 100 billion each.

That is why the pace will be slow, and dangers will be greater. Imagine putting every single AI engineer in all of these companies working together, building together, and using all the resources together? They could have been so much better. But the potential for a bit more profit caused them to compete with each other instead of building the best one.

[Unknown Op]

It's a bit of both. No company ever wanted their AI model to behave in such an unexpected way that can damage their trust. Similarly, publishing result of this type of safety test can make models more capable than those of their competitor in market. That does not mean that they are trying to exaggerate risk, but yes, it does attract attention.

Mostly, this type of incident happen when researchers do internal testing. They are deliberately pushing their models to check their limits. That is different from AI randomly hacking system in real time in real world. That shows that extensive safety testing is very necessary before the system and the models are released for public use.

[TastyChillySauce00]

Good responses by almost all respondents. But let me add something I read today.

Prof Alan Woodward, professor of cyber-security at the University of Surrey, said these cases - while distinct in what happened and why - tell an important story.

"For 30 years, one rule of software testing held firm: whatever happens in the test environment stays in the test environment," he said.

"In the past month, that rule has been broken three times."

For about 30 years, what happened in the sandboxes (which are protected spaces designed to test-run the potential of AI tools before they are released to the public) was kept secret. Why are these tech companies now making it public? An article from the BBC seems to agree with the content of this thread.

After finding out for more information, there are funny little detail that those news website deliberately left out just to make the news interesting, apparently most of the AI escape event was caused by third party tester misconfiguration of the sandbox. Anthropic clearly stated the misconfiguration left the machine with live internet access :

Due to a misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner, this was not the case, and internet access was available. Because of this, when Claude’s search led it to real systems on the open internet, it treated them as part of the exercise. source : https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals

Funnily enough the same exact thing also said by Meta about their AI escaping their sandbox. Maybe the only notable thing to mention is OpenAI's model because it genuinely found a zero days exploit from third party vendor JFrog and has informed the vendor accordingly. I wouldn't believe these AI exploit news unless there is published CVEs that get credited to the research team behind the AI model.