MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 24.03.14

Authoritarian Surveillance, Censorship, and Use: Delegation of Decision-Making Authority to Malicious Actors

Category: Malicious Uses

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Description

"Finally, the principal value proposition of AI assistants is that they can either enhance or automate decision-making capabilities of people in society, thus lowering the cost and increasing the accuracy of decision-making for its user. However, benefiting from this enhancement necessarily means delegating some degree of agency away from a human and towards an automated decision-making system—motivating research fields such as value alignment. This introduces a whole new form of malicious use which does not break the tripwire of what one might call an ‘attack’ (social engineering, cyber offen

From The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Domain: 4. Malicious actors
Subdomain: 4.1 Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale
Causal entity: Other
Intent: Intentional
Timing: Post-deployment

Subdomain definition: Using AI systems to conduct large-scale disinformation campaigns, malicious surveillance, or targeted and sophisticated automated censorship and propaganda, with the aim to manipulate political processes, public opinion and behavior.

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

Browse all incidents in this subdomain

How other frameworks describe this risk

Electoral interference
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Political manipulation
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Coercion/manipulation
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Political and Economic
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)
Biased influence through citizen screening and tailored propaganda
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)
Political
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence - Future Outlooks and Emerging Risks (Allianz2018)
Surveillance and Censorship
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)
Disinformation and manipulation of public opinion
International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

Other entries from Gabriel2024

Capability failures Risk Category · 7.3
Lack of capability for task Risk Sub-Category · 7.3
Difficult to develop metrics for evaluating benefits or harms caused by AI assistants Risk Sub-Category · 6.5
Safe exploration problem with widely deployed AI assistants Risk Sub-Category · 7.3
Goal-related failures Risk Category · 7.1
Misaligned consequentialist reasoning Risk Sub-Category · 7.3
Specification gaming Risk Sub-Category · 7.1
Goal misgeneralisation Risk Sub-Category · 7.1
Deceptive alignment Risk Sub-Category · 7.1
Malicious Uses Risk Category · 4.0
Offensive Cyber Operations (General) Risk Sub-Category · 4.2
AI-Powered Spear-Phishing at Scale Risk Sub-Category · 4.1