MASS EVENT WILL LET HACKERS TEST LIMITS OF AI TECHNOLOGY

No sooner did ChatGPT get unleashed than hackers started "jailbreaking" the artificial intelligence chatbot - trying to override its safeguards so it could blurt out something unhinged or obscene

But now its maker, OpenAI, and other major Al providers such as Google and Microsoft, are coordinating with the Biden administration to let thousands of hackers take a shot at testing the limits of their technology.

Some of the things they'll be looking to find: How can chatbots be manipulated to cause harm? Will they share the private information we confide in them to other users? And why do they assume a doctor is a man and a nurse is a woman? "This is why we need thousands of people, said Rumman Chowdhury, a coordinator of the mass hacking event planned for this summer's DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas that's expected to draw several thousand people.

"We need a lot of people with a wide range of lived experiences, subject matter expertise and backgrounds hacking at these models and trying to find problems that can then go be fixed." Anyone who's tried ChatGPT, Microsoft's Bing chatbot or Google's Bard will have quickly learned that they have a tendency to fabricate information and confidently present it as fact.

These systems, built on what's known as large language models, also emulate the cultural biases they've learned from being trained upon huge troves of what people have written online.

The idea of a mass hack caught the attention of U.S. government officials in March at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where Sven Cattell, founder of DEF CON's long-running Al Village, and Austin Carson, president of responsible Al nonprofit SeedAI, helped lead a workshop inviting community college students to hack an Al model.