Law
What will the EU's proposed act to regulate AI mean for consumers?
The EU's proposed AI act was endorsed by the European parliament on Wednesday, and is a milestone in regulating the technology. The vote is an important step towards introducing the legislation, which now requires the formal approval of ministers from EU member states. Consumers will not notice an immediate difference, given that the act will be implemented over a period of three years, but it will answer some concerns over the technology. "Users will be able to trust that the AI tools they have access to have been carefully vetted and are safe to use," said Guillaume Couneson, partner at law firm Linklaters. "This is similar to users of banking apps being able to trust that the bank has taken stringent security measures to enable them to use the apps safely."
Generative Models and Connected and Automated Vehicles: A Survey in Exploring the Intersection of Transportation and AI
This report investigates the history and impact of Generative Models and Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs), two groundbreaking forces pushing progress in technology and transportation. By focusing on the application of generative models within the context of CAVs, the study aims to unravel how this integration could enhance predictive modeling, simulation accuracy, and decision-making processes in autonomous vehicles. This thesis discusses the benefits and challenges of integrating generative models and CAV technology in transportation. It aims to highlight the progress made, the remaining obstacles, and the potential for advancements in safety and innovation.
Caveat Lector: Large Language Models in Legal Practice
The current fascination with large language models, or LLMs, derives from the fact that many users lack the expertise to evaluate the quality of the generated text. LLMs may therefore appear more capable than they actually are. The dangerous combination of fluency and superficial plausibility leads to the temptation to trust the generated text and creates the risk of overreliance. Who would not trust perfect legalese? Relying recent findings in both technical and legal scholarship, this Article counterbalances the overly optimistic predictions as to the role of LLMs in legal practice. Integrating LLMs into legal workstreams without a better comprehension of their limitations, will create inefficiencies if not outright risks. Notwithstanding their unprecedented ability to generate text, LLMs do not understand text. Without the ability to understand meaning, LLMs will remain unable to use language, to acquire knowledge and to perform complex reasoning tasks. Trained to model language on the basis of stochastic word predictions, LLMs cannot distinguish fact from fiction. Their knowledge of the law is limited to word strings memorized in their parameters. It is also incomplete and largely incorrect. LLMs operate at the level of word distributions, not at the level of verified facts. The resulting propensity to hallucinate, to produce statements that are incorrect but appear helpful and relevant, is alarming in high-risk areas like legal services. At present, lawyers should beware of relying on text generated by LLMs.
AdaShield: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models from Structure-based Attack via Adaptive Shield Prompting
Wang, Yu, Liu, Xiaogeng, Li, Yu, Chen, Muhao, Xiao, Chaowei
With the advent and widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the imperative to ensure their safety has become increasingly pronounced. However, with the integration of additional modalities, MLLMs are exposed to new vulnerabilities, rendering them prone to structured-based jailbreak attacks, where semantic content (e.g., "harmful text") has been injected into the images to mislead MLLMs. In this work, we aim to defend against such threats. Specifically, we propose \textbf{Ada}ptive \textbf{Shield} Prompting (\textbf{AdaShield}), which prepends inputs with defense prompts to defend MLLMs against structure-based jailbreak attacks without fine-tuning MLLMs or training additional modules (e.g., post-stage content detector). Initially, we present a manually designed static defense prompt, which thoroughly examines the image and instruction content step by step and specifies response methods to malicious queries. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive auto-refinement framework, consisting of a target MLLM and a LLM-based defense prompt generator (Defender). These components collaboratively and iteratively communicate to generate a defense prompt. Extensive experiments on the popular structure-based jailbreak attacks and benign datasets show that our methods can consistently improve MLLMs' robustness against structure-based jailbreak attacks without compromising the model's general capabilities evaluated on standard benign tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/rain305f/AdaShield.
Trust AI Regulation? Discerning users are vital to build trust and effective AI regulation
Alalawi, Zainab, Bova, Paolo, Cimpeanu, Theodor, Di Stefano, Alessandro, Duong, Manh Hong, Domingos, Elias Fernandez, Han, The Anh, Krellner, Marcus, Ogbo, Bianca, Powers, Simon T., Zimmaro, Filippo
There is general agreement that some form of regulation is necessary both for AI creators to be incentivised to develop trustworthy systems, and for users to actually trust those systems. But there is much debate about what form these regulations should take and how they should be implemented. Most work in this area has been qualitative, and has not been able to make formal predictions. Here, we propose that evolutionary game theory can be used to quantitatively model the dilemmas faced by users, AI creators, and regulators, and provide insights into the possible effects of different regulatory regimes. We show that creating trustworthy AI and user trust requires regulators to be incentivised to regulate effectively. We demonstrate the effectiveness of two mechanisms that can achieve this. The first is where governments can recognise and reward regulators that do a good job. In that case, if the AI system is not too risky for users then some level of trustworthy development and user trust evolves. We then consider an alternative solution, where users can condition their trust decision on the effectiveness of the regulators. This leads to effective regulation, and consequently the development of trustworthy AI and user trust, provided that the cost of implementing regulations is not too high. Our findings highlight the importance of considering the effect of different regulatory regimes from an evolutionary game theoretic perspective.
Evaluating LLMs for Gender Disparities in Notable Persons
Rhue, Lauren, Goethals, Sofie, Sundararajan, Arun
This study examines the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for retrieving factual information, addressing concerns over their propensity to produce factually incorrect "hallucinated" responses or to altogether decline to even answer prompt at all. Specifically, it investigates the presence of gender-based biases in LLMs' responses to factual inquiries. This paper takes a multi-pronged approach to evaluating GPT models by evaluating fairness across multiple dimensions of recall, hallucinations and declinations. Our findings reveal discernible gender disparities in the responses generated by GPT-3.5. While advancements in GPT-4 have led to improvements in performance, they have not fully eradicated these gender disparities, notably in instances where responses are declined. The study further explores the origins of these disparities by examining the influence of gender associations in prompts and the homogeneity in the responses.
Logits of API-Protected LLMs Leak Proprietary Information
Finlayson, Matthew, Ren, Xiang, Swayamdipta, Swabha
The commercialization of large language models (LLMs) has led to the common practice of high-level API-only access to proprietary models. In this work, we show that even with a conservative assumption about the model architecture, it is possible to learn a surprisingly large amount of non-public information about an API-protected LLM from a relatively small number of API queries (e.g., costing under $1,000 for OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo). Our findings are centered on one key observation: most modern LLMs suffer from a softmax bottleneck, which restricts the model outputs to a linear subspace of the full output space. We show that this lends itself to a model image or a model signature which unlocks several capabilities with affordable cost: efficiently discovering the LLM's hidden size, obtaining full-vocabulary outputs, detecting and disambiguating different model updates, identifying the source LLM given a single full LLM output, and even estimating the output layer parameters. Our empirical investigations show the effectiveness of our methods, which allow us to estimate the embedding size of OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo to be about 4,096. Lastly, we discuss ways that LLM providers can guard against these attacks, as well as how these capabilities can be viewed as a feature (rather than a bug) by allowing for greater transparency and accountability.
EU regulators pass the planet's first sweeping AI regulations
The European Parliament has approved sweeping legislation to regulate artificial intelligence, nearly three years after the draft rules were first proposed. Officials reached an agreement on AI development in December. On Wednesday, members of the parliament approved the AI Act with 523 votes in favor and 46 against, There were 49 abstentions. The EU says the regulations seek to "protect fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability from high-risk AI, while boosting innovation and establishing Europe as a leader in the field." The act defines obligations for AI applications based on potential risks and impact.
Fox News AI Newsletter: 'Uncontrollable' systems could turn on humans, report warns
Artificial Intelligence words are seen in this illustration taken on March 31, 2023. RISE OF THE MACHINES: The U.S. government has a "clear and urgent need" to act, as swiftly developing artificial intelligence could potentially lead to human extinction through weaponization and loss of control, according to a government-commissioned report. 'SMALL, SMART, CHEAP': The Pentagon will look to develop new artificial intelligence-guided planes, offering two contracts that several private companies have been competing to obtain. The Pentagon is seen from a flight taking off from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia. While this technology offers many astonishing benefits, it also poses significant dangers.