Future Gist 38
Future Gist 38
AI does good and bad stuff, Apple controversy, and Climate Change.
🤖AI Wrote Better Phishing Emails Than Humans in a Recent Test: Humans are gullible. We’re susceptible to marketing and various forms of social engineering. Phishing attacks are one example in which human gullibility is put on full display. The attacker sends an email or message to a target, often in a manner that appeals to the target. The target then clicks a link and is often led to a website that while often legitimate-looking, convinces the target to give up important details about themselves; details that may subsequently be used for an even more vicious cyber-attack. In a recent test, researchers made use of text generation tools like GPT-3 to create the sort of phishing messages I described above. The result? People were more susceptible to phishing attacks created using AI. It makes note of how rapidly AI-oriented tools around NLP(Natural Language Processing) are evolving, but also our inability to distinguish between inauthentic generated content and that which is genuine. For now, the cost of building tools like this may make phishing attacks that make use of AI tools like GPT-3 infeasible. But as the field progresses and things generally get cheaper, only God knows what sort of attacks will be unleashed on us en-masse: {1179 words}
👩💻OpenAI upgrades its natural language AI coder Codex and kicks off private beta: Meanwhile, OpenAI just revealed Codex to the world. During the GPT-3 beta, many were stunned to find out that this text generation tool was clearly able to write code.
Since then, OpenAI in collaboration with Github released Co-pilot, a tool meant to assist programmers. The model that powers Co-pilot, Codex, had since been inaccessible to developers, until now. {960 words}
🍎Apple’s controversial new child protection features, explained: Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you’d have read or at least heard about Apple seeking to scan its user’s phones for CSAM. What could possibly go wrong with this?
While a noteworthy endeavor, the sort of technology Apple wants to use could also be expanded to target dissidents of authoritarian states. Apple has been known to bend the knee to authoritarian states. Hence, it shouldn’t be difficult to reason why people are worried about this.{2715 words}
🌡️Landmark U.N. report delivers stark warning on climate change, says it’s ‘code red for humanity’: Climate Change has long since been here, and we’re on a collision course towards irreversible climate catastrophe and suffering. The problem has been convincing world leaders first and foremost to act, and convincing deniers that it is indeed a man-made issue. In its most recent climate report, the IPCC lays out what has long been the case: that action is of the greatest necessity, lest we suffer irredeemable consequences.{1352 words}
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