Malicious Uses

Making disinformation cheaper and more effective

"LMs can be used to create synthetic media and ‘fake news’, and may reduce the cost of producing disinformation at scale (Buchanan et al., 2021). While some predict that it will be cheaper to hire humans to generate disinformation (Tamkin et al., 2021), it is possible that LM-assisted content generation may offer a cheaper way of generating diffuse disinformation at scale."

Facilitating fraud, scames and more targeted manipulation

"LM prediction can potentially be used to increase the effectiveness of crimes such as email scams, which can cause financial and psychological harm. While LMs may not reduce the cost of sending a scam email - the cost of sending mass emails is already low - they may make such scams more effective by generating more personalised and compelling text at scale, or by maintaining a conversation with a victim over multiple rounds of exchange."

Assisting code generation for cyber attacks, weapons, or malicious use

Illegitimate surveillance and censorship

"The collection of large amounts of information about people for the purpose of mass surveillance has raised ethical and social concerns, including risk of censorship and of undermining public discourse (Cyphers and Gebhart, 2019; Stahl, 2016; Véliz, 2019). Sifting through these large datasets previously required millions of human analysts (Hunt and Xu, 2013), but is increasingly being automated using AI (Andersen, 2020; Shahbaz and Funk, 2019)."