AI as Spy? Global Experts Caution That Artificial Intelligence Is Used To Track People, Keep Their Data

On June 22, 2023, the Bloomberg Technology Summit was held in San Francisco with the theme "Tech's Turning Point." The one-day event focused on topics, such as the rapidly changing landscape of social media, the future of cryptocurrency technology, and the power and threats of artificial intelligence services. Now on its seventh year, the summit featured interviews with inventors, CEOs, influencers, and entrepreneurs.

Global Experts Sound the Alarm

Several industry experts expressed their concern regarding the role of artificial intelligence in transforming espionage. AI systems appear in deceptive façade which the audience perceives as something magical and innocuous, but the technology is actually intrusive and exploitative.

CEOs of popular generative AI companies, such as Sam Altman of OpenAI and Emad Mostaque at Stability AI, were called out by Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, for not revealing the truth about their products powered by work grunts. According to Hanna, there are workers who do the annotation to make their system work to any degree. While the CEOs claim that these are autonomous, there are actually humans who do the labeling.

On the other hand, Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker focused on privacy which seems to be compromised by chatbots like ChatGPT. She believes that majority of the users are the subject of AI which is not a matter of personal choice.

Aside from the fact that AI models operate out of public view, they also serve as a form of surveillance technology, claimed Whittaker. Massive amounts of datasets are collected from the users and processed by AI firms to be used in surveilling the public. Billions of webpages glean the data virtually from any user to scrape the datasets without their permission. She also added that these data gain control over a person's life, and this power is being manipulated by the AI companies.

Changing the Rules of Spycraft

Spying and other forms of intelligence assessments is not a recent activity as it already existed in the past. However, with the advancement of technology, intelligence agencies can have more data to process in our modern times than ever before.

In an interview with the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), Amy Zegart from Stanford University discussed how AI revolutionizes the traditional business of data gathering and analysis. She discussed the five things that change the intelligence industry in dramatic ways.

First, we are more prone to threats as cyberspace digitally connects power and geographic distances, the two factors used to provide security in the past. Secondly, more data are generated by modern technologies, and AI serves as the key in using open-source intelligence.

The third factor is the speed of transferring data. Today, intelligence insights can travel at a faster rate leading to quicker collection of information. The fourth one is the number of people involved in the decision-making process. A person does not need to have security clearances to be a decision maker as this can also be done by tech company leaders. Lastly, competition drives the need for more data gathering. Intelligence has become anybody's business and AI provides an avenue for data collection and analysis.