Some Books that Show how Lame AI Is

Over the weekend I finished Your Face Belongs to Us which is a look at the founding of Clearview AI and how facial recognition has developed over the last decade. While it was a stark look at how easily you can be tracked today, even in the back of someone’s photo, I was more disappointed with how easily Clearview got off.

They had a few lucky breaks, like Covid19, that turned the world away from being aghast at what they were doing just as everyone was getting angry about it and it seemed like a groundswell would put them out to pasture. They also got a “lucky” break with 9/11 pushing everyone towards feeling like they would trade off privacy for security.

Now I’ve moved on to Not with a Bug, but with a Sticker, which shows just how dumb and fragile AI systems really are. From forcing an AI image program to see a panda as a monkey, to “hacking” an LLM to spew hate or tricking an image generation tool to produce child pornography, we have barely scratched the surface of securing AI.

So far, according to the authors, North America is not ready for the AI tools that will be deployed against it, and isn’t spending near enough money to even catch up to many of the world’s other powers.

After starting Not with a Bug, and finishing the book on Clearview, I’m more firmly in the camp that feels AI is another tech hype cycle pushed by investors to make sure they can get money out of people and become even bigger billionaires. This lines up with the uses I’ve seen for ChatGPT at work, where I get sent code that sort of works, but doesn’t match our coding standards and has glaring security issues, but someone has already tried it out on some production server because they’re the boss and figured it was fine.

I know talking to other developer friends they’re getting the same crappy code that sort of works, but is also so full of issues that you’d never hire someone that produced the code because they would clearly barely know what they’re doing.

But of course VC’s must have a new thing to hype now that crypto is known to be a ponzi scheme.