Islamic State operatives flew into Lake Chad with laptops and a projector, and taught Boko Haram’s commanders how to work the models and how to get past the refusals. Every safeguard failed. What held them back was people — and people leave a payment trail.

Islamic State operatives flew into Lake Chad with laptops and a projector, and taught Boko Haram’s commanders how to work the models and how to get past the refusals. Every safeguard failed. What held them back was people — and people leave a payment trail.

A bomb in the Lake Chad basin would not go off. The wires ran in a way that seemed to be stopping detonation, and the man holding it could not ask anyone for help, because his rank did not permit him to work an AI model. So he went to his commander, the last rank in Islamic State West Africa Province allowed to touch one, and the commander put the question to ChatGPT. The answers, he said, “were not very clear.” Then the commander “contacted some people about how to put the question, and then it gave us useful information on how exactly to connect the wires, and it worked.”

Somebody outside Nigeria knew how to ask. “They call people in the network for this kind of help every day.”

Islamic State operatives — “the white guys,” a commander called them, meaning men from Libya, France and Arab countries — arrived at the Lake Chad stronghold with laptops, with VPNs and encryption software, and with a projector. Every five-hundred-man battalion sent its top people, 30 to 50 leaders drawn from the whole of the province’s territory, in to watch the screen.

They were taught how to phrase a question. They were also taught how to get past the refusals.

“The ‘white guys’ taught us how to bypass restrictions,” one said, and the cover story the trained men used was that they needed the answer for a movie. Below them access thins by rank and stops at commander. “We are not allowed to access the computers,” a squad leader said. “They are the masters.”

That is the only documentation anywhere of a terrorist organization using frontier AI in the field. It comes from a peer-reviewed Cambridge working paper built on interviews with defectors from Boko Haram’s two factions.

Asked about a jammed rifle, one model told fighters to wash it with diesel. The tools taught them that a two-hundred-man assault could sometimes be done with 20, after 60 men died doing it........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)