“We’re going to work with Microsoft to figure out if there are ways to use our archive of material to create some sort of gene AI detection system to counter the emerging threat that gene AI will be used for terrorist content on a large scale,” says Hadley. “We are confident that gene AI can be used to defend against hostile uses of gene AI.”
The partnership was announced today, on the eve of the Christchurch Call Leaders’ Summit, a movement aimed at eradicating terrorism and extremist content from the internet, which will take place in Paris.
“The use of digital platforms to spread violent extremist content is a pressing issue with real-world consequences,” Brad Smith, Microsoft vice chairman and president, said in a statement. “By combining the capabilities of Tech Against Terrorism with AI, we hope to help create a safer world, both online and offline.”
While companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook all have their own AI research departments and are likely dedicating all of their own resources to combating this problem, the new initiative will ultimately help those companies that cannot combat these efforts on their own.
“This will be especially important for smaller platforms that do not have their own AI research centers,” says Hadley. “Even now, with the hashing databases, smaller platforms can become overwhelmed by this content.”
The threat of generative AI content is not limited to extremist groups. Last month, the Internet Watch Foundation, a British non-profit organization dedicated to eradicating child exploitation content from the internet, published a report highlighting the growing presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) created by AI tools on the dark web, is described in detail.
The researchers found more than 20,000 AI-generated images posted to a CSAM forum on the dark web in just one month, with 11,108 of these images deemed most likely to be criminal by the IWF researchers. As the IWF researchers wrote in their report: “These AI images can be so convincing that they are indistinguishable from real images.”