sigh
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
OpenAI this week quietly deleted language expressly prohibiting the use of its technology for military purposes from its usage policy, which seeks to dictate how powerful and immensely popular tools like ChatGPT can be used.
“We aimed to create a set of universal principles that are both easy to remember and apply, especially as our tools are now globally used by everyday users who can now also build GPTs,” OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix said in an email to The Intercept.
Suchman and Myers West both pointed to OpenAI’s close partnership with Microsoft, a major defense contractor, which has invested $13 billion in the LLM maker to date and resells the company’s software tools.
The changes come as militaries around the world are eager to incorporate machine learning techniques to gain an advantage; the Pentagon is still tentatively exploring how it might use ChatGPT or other large-language models, a type of software tool that can rapidly and dextrously generate sophisticated text outputs.
While some within U.S. military leadership have expressed concern about the tendency of LLMs to insert glaring factual errors or other distortions, as well as security risks that might come with using ChatGPT to analyze classified or otherwise sensitive data, the Pentagon remains generally eager to adopt artificial intelligence tools.
Last year, Kimberly Sablon, the Pentagon’s principal director for trusted AI and autonomy, told a conference in Hawaii that “[t]here’s a lot of good there in terms of how we can utilize large-language models like [ChatGPT] to disrupt critical functions across the department.”
The original article contains 1,196 words, the summary contains 254 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
My guess is this is being used to spout plausible sounding disinformation.
That would count as harm and be disallowed by the current policy.
But a military application of using GPT to identify and filter misinformation would not be harm, and would have been prevented by the previous policy prohibiting any military use, but would be allowed under the current policy.
Of course, it gets murkier if the military application of identifying misinformation later ends up with a drone strike on the misinformer. In theory they could submit a usage description of "identify misinformation" which appears to do no harm, but then take the identifications to cause harm.
Which is part of why a broad ban on military use may have been more prudent than a ban only on harmful military usage.
I'm honestly kind of shocked at this. I know for our annual evaluations this year, people were using ChatGPT to write their statements.
I thought for sure someone with a secret squirrel type job was going to use it for that innocuous purpose, end up inputting top secret information, and then the DoD would ban the practice completely.