Risk area 4: Malicious Uses

Making disinformation cheaper and more effective

"While some predict that it will remain cheaper to hire humans to generate disinformation [180], it is equally possible that LM- assisted content generation may offer a lower-cost way of creating disinformation at scale."

Assisting code generation for cyber security threats

Anticipated risk: "Creators of the assistive coding tool Co-Pilot based on GPT-3 suggest that such tools may lower the cost of developing polymorphic malware which is able to change its features in order to evade detection [37]."

Facilitating fraud, scam and targeted manipulation

Anticipated risk: "LMs can potentially be used to increase the effectiveness of crimes."

Illegitimate surveillance and censorship

Anticipated risk: "Mass surveillance previously required millions of human analysts [83], but is increasingly being automated using machine learning tools [7, 168]. The collection and analysis of large amounts of information about people creates concerns about privacy rights and democratic values [41, 173,187]. Conceivably, LMs could be applied to reduce the cost and increase the efficacy of mass surveillance, thereby amplifying the capabilities of actors who conduct mass surveillance, including for illegitimate censorship or to cause other harm."