Social media sites are already getting overwhelmed by spam, fake images, fake videos, blackmail attempts, phishing, etc. The only way to counteract the speed and volume of massive AI-driven attacks is with AI-powered defenses. These defenses need rules. If those rules aren’t formal and proven robust, then they will likely be hacked and exploited by adversarial AIs. So at the most basic level, we need infrastructure rules which are provably robust against classes of attacks. What those attack classes are and what properties those rules guarantee is part of what I’m arguing we need to be working on right now.
Maybe it would be more productive to focus on these nearer-term topics, which perhaps can be discussed more concretely. Have you talked to any experts in formal methods who think that it would be feasible (in the near future) to define such AI-driven attack classes and desirable properties for defenses against them, and do they have any specific ideas for doing so? Again from my own experience in cryptography, it took decades to formally define/refine seemingly much simpler concepts, so it’s hard for me to understand where your relative optimism comes from.
Maybe it would be more productive to focus on these nearer-term topics, which perhaps can be discussed more concretely. Have you talked to any experts in formal methods who think that it would be feasible (in the near future) to define such AI-driven attack classes and desirable properties for defenses against them, and do they have any specific ideas for doing so? Again from my own experience in cryptography, it took decades to formally define/refine seemingly much simpler concepts, so it’s hard for me to understand where your relative optimism comes from.