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Harmful Content Generation at Scale (General)

The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants

Gabriel et al. (2024)

Sub-category
Risk Domain

Using AI systems to conduct large-scale disinformation campaigns, malicious surveillance, or targeted and sophisticated automated censorship and propaganda, with the aim of manipulating political processes, public opinion, and behavior.

"While harmful content like child sexual abuse material, fraud, and disinformation are not new challenges for governments and developers, without the proper safety and security mechanisms, advanced AI assistants may allow threat actors to create harmful content more quickly, accurately, and with a longer reach. In particular, concerns arise in relation to the following areas: - Multimodal content quality: Driven by frontier models, advanced AI assistants can automatically generate much higher-quality, human-looking text, images, audio, and video than prior AI applications. Currently, creating this content often requires hiring people who speak the language of the population being targeted. AI assistants can now do this much more cheaply and efficiently. - Cost of content creation: AI assistants can substantially decrease the costs of content creation, further lowering the barrier to entry for malicious actors to carry out harmful attacks. In the past, creating and disseminating misinformation required a significant investment of time and money. AI assistants can now do this much more cheaply and efficiently. - Personalization: Advanced AI assistants can reduce obstacles to creating personalized content. Foundation models that condition their generations on personal attributes or information can create realistic personalized content which could be more persuasive. In the past, creating personalized content was a time-consuming and expensive process. AI assistants can now do this much more cheaply and efficiently."(p. 74)

Part of Malicious Uses

Other risks from Gabriel et al. (2024) (69)