Lane von Herzen: Further Hidden Perils of AI-Driven Search Engines

My Third Novel's Conclusion, My Heartbreak

My heart begins to break when I think about completing this particular book -- because this narrative has sustained me like no other story I've known. It's both more personal and more universal than my other works. But beyond memory and archetype, it's a cri-de-coeur about needing to become the person one is destined to be. And in the writing, I have met my own life's work, my own fated journey -- having the sense all the while that the pages are suffused with a resonance, an energy, an electrified field that defies explanation. Writers hope and pray to be overtaken by a work in this way -- to be conscripted into passionate service of a profound story. To experience it even once in a lifetime seems a great privilege. I still have several months before this novel is complete, and this constitutes my reprieve. Because I'm not ready for the beauty to end.

Saturday, March 11, 2023

Further Hidden Perils of AI-Driven Search Engines

Further to my post yesterday concerning democracies' need to fully characterize AI-driven search engines in their proclivity to create "kompromat" about their users, there are additional risks within AI chatbots' potential to sabotage consumers' internet access due to broad-scale cyberattack by malicious users of technology.

This threat to democracies worldwide is described by author Thomas P. Vartanian in his just-published book, The Unhackable Internet. In its pages, he describes the risks of AI chatbots which could easily refer trusting users to compromised links to exploitive servers. In his words, a cyberattack facilitated by chatbots could rely on "intelligent neural network features" that "enhance the efficiency of the attack by ensuring that only relevant material was exfiltrated." The problem is that, alongside individual users' personal and financial data being aggregated and exploited by an AI chatbot, larger financial systems on which entire economies rely could be brought to a standstill by a coordinated cyberattack facilitated by AI-driven search engines which are utilized by a significant percentage of the public.

Again, we need to study the potential misuse of the powerful technologies present -- or easily introduced in the future -- within AI-driven search engines.

According to Clement Delangue, head of an AI company which "helps run open-source projects similar to ChatGPT," which is Microsoft's AI chatbot through Bing, "the cloud computing providers have gone all in on AI over the last few months." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/technology/chatbots-disrupt-internet-industry.html

Why the rush, gentlemen?

Do democracies really want AI-driven search engines to usurp the sovereignty of elected representative governments through the argument that electorates' commercial consumption can be "optimized" by artificial intelligence that can effectively commoditize the public itself?

AI-driven search engines constitute a Trojan horse for democratic nations worldwide.

We do not need the usual high-tech entrepreneurs on the forefront of this technology. We need cyber security specialists. We need ethicists. We need human rights experts.

And we need openness and transparency from the FBI and its affiliates concerning all internal and external FBI communications pertaining to AI-driven search engines' development, capabilities, and hidden applications.

Totalitarianism can arrive in many forms.

In this case, it is knocking at our door with an offer to make our lives as consumers easier and more efficient.

My sense is that the far right segments of the FBI know a very great deal about Microsoft's ChatGPT and comparable AI-driven search engines.

The American public deserves to have full access to that knowledge prior to this powerful technology being introduced into the United States and other democracies.

Democracies should prohibit the release of AI chatbots and their affiliated AI-driven search engines until the risks they may introduce to democratic societies and free-market economies can be fully evaluated and vetted through public review.