How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI
Comments
arjie
solid_fuel
> We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process.
Is it providing material aid to terrorists to point out that maybe a hole filled with water would have been a better practice environment?
BeetleB
I assume you're asking in jest, but having experience in the matter:
Any information you give to someone/group, where you know or have good reason to believe it will be used for terrorism purposes (including training), does put you liable for providing material aid to terrorists.
infinite_spin
dear terrorists,
do not drink water, fish fuck in it.
sincerely,
fatty arbuckle
bijowo1676
US Congressman Scott Perry said that USA has financed Boko Haram and other similar groups (remember how Pentagon and CIA independently backed different terrorist groups in Syria, that even fought each other?)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl...
solid_fuel
Scott Perry is a traitor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Perry#Involvement_in_att...
I don't really give a fuck what he claims.
jacobolus
Scott Perry didn't present any evidence for those claims. Ideologically he is opposed to the humanitarian work USAID does around the world, and he cheered as Elon Musk dismantled the agency.
Perry was also one of the key figures in the criminal conspiracy trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election and overthrow the US government to install Donald Trump as a dictator based on a series of outrageous lies. If Trump hadn't been elected again in 2024, interrupting the relevant investigations, there's a decent chance Perry would be either on trial or perhaps even already convicted for his crimes (conscious of his guilt, he directly asked Trump for a pardon).
I wouldn't consider any claims he makes credible without some corroborating evidence.
mothballed
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warumdarum
That whole line of thinking has been shown to be racistly motivated. Basically western diabolism is white exceptionalism with a twist.
cindyllm
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bombcar
Using water is like assuming the testing environment and production are the same.
ajmurmann
I always make sure that a test failure carries the same financial loss as a production outage. Otherwise engineers just won't try hard enough.
uniclaude
This comment will definitely get you on a list somewhere. Either the CIA or my favorite comments on hn, maybe both.
glaslong
Is this a riddle where you happen to work for the CIA?
throwup238
The water damage would ruin the motorcycles. They can always get more jumpers. The hard part is motivating them!
lisper
I wouldn't think the glass and fire would do them a lot of good either.
blitzar
I suddenly feel so much more comfortable with the US "warfighters" using LLMs for everything.
monksy
These safeties in AI are out of control. Who knows where we would be if they were using heretic models.
RobRivera
I would pay premium coin for a slaanesh AI model
notahacker
Not gonna lie, I'd rather attack with 26 fighters that haven't survived lots of jump attempts than 8 who are much more confident in their motorbike stunt riding but presumably still aren't bulletproof.
But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
sixhobbits
This is a scene in Catch22 IIRC where they decide to stop training the soldiers who need to parachute behind enemy lines because the fatality rate of training was so high that mathematically it made more sense to send in untrained soldiers.
selimthegrim
This also reminds me of a offhanded remark in a SsethTzeentach review where he criticizes the Titanic passengers for not having the decency to be ballast and plug the hole with their own bodies
stymaar
> But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
“unfortunately, my seven remaining comrades died in the process and I can't train anymore since there's no one to shoot at me”.
mirekrusin
And now you’re ready to level up with motorbike jump.
27183
> maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
Practice makes perfect!
IsTom
You start with .22 and build up resistance from there.
Ancapistani
I'd suggest starting with a 2mm Kolibri, if you can find one.
jurgenburgen
Maybe add some lead supplements to your diet first to build up tolerance.
27183
The science of homeopathy tells us that if you dilute it a lot it makes the immunity more powerful.
antonymoose
Well that’s easy, start shooting yourself in the foot with .22 until you develop a tolerance and bump up to .380!
misnome
That's how you get Gun Kata
bigmattystyles
You need Jean Claude for that.
ajmurmann
I hope that the first model to reach ASI will be called that. I don't want humanity to go out with a whimper nor a bang but with a pun
johnsmith1840
If anything the leadership gave BS answers to the journalist for the exact reaction HN is portraying right now.
"They're so dumb AI is harmless" is a danerous take when the people in charge are often times more educated than an average westener. They also are decent at propoganda (you have certainly consumed pumped or direct propoganda from terrorist orgs).
Their leaders are often university grads from the west. It is smart (enough) people leading delusional farmers but the article is clear that the farmers are just given AI commands from the leadership. There's still strong asymetry occuring here that more funded orgs have the better AI but if AI flattens and opensource catches up it's gonna be a real interesting world where every terrorist also has a team of advanced weapon engineers and tacticians available.
rgbrenner
"Their leaders are often university grads from the west."
This is a generalization.. and you're right that there are terrorist groups run by people educated in the west... but this isn't true for Boko Haram. Barkura Doro has no formal education.
johnsmith1840
"Often" does a lot of work there. But the general point is that thinking these guys are dumb is dangerous.
Legend2440
Honestly this sounds so outlandish that it makes me skeptical of the whole thing.
They didn't stop after the first guy died? Or the tenth? Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next?
And where's the video? Terrorist groups love propaganda footage, if they were doing motorcycle stunts like Evel Knievel they'd be bragging about it everywhere.
woadwarrior01
If they were wary of dying, they wouldn't be in the business of terrorism in the first place. Also, they almost certainly believe in a better afterlife. Reminds of the old animated short: Saga of Bjorn[1].
graemep
The terrorist group that pioneered modern suicide bombs and was their largest scale user by far was multi-religious in its membership and had atheists in its leadership.
Obviously an Islamist group will tend to be different, but remember the British guys who were reading The Dummies Guide to Islam on their way to join ISIS?
The people carrying out terrorism (not the organisers higher up) tend not to be very bright or clear thinking. The are convinced blowing things up will make the world a better place.
petilon
Surely even terrorists want to die for a cause, not during practice.
warumdarum
Shh, shhh , shaheed. They do not even have medics for the most trivial of wounds.
dylan604
Are you granted your virgins if you do not take out any infidel?
petesergeant
ChatGPT says "it depends" and hedges: "not automatically a martyr in the technical legal sense, but possibly a martyr in reward"
distances
Please don't just provide LLM answers in human discussions. It's rude.
petesergeant
Ruder than completely ignoring the context of the article and thread, and then drive-by moralizing?
rightbyte
Yeah this didn't happen. If someone is cracy enough to practice with holes filled with glass on fire why trust them at all about being cracy in the first place?
evan_
where'd they get so much broken glass that it would fill a hole anyway? They just have that much glass on hand?
lukan
Erm, if you have 18 guys to spend on training, you also have some empty bottles or access to a place where there are more empty bottles.
Whether crazy people are actually crazy enough to literally do what a LLM gave them as a action sequence from movie inspiration - I have no idea. But I doubt it here.
true_religion
Bokom Haram regularly kidnaps children. The girls become “wives”. The boys become the next generation of soldier.
gwerbin
Wasn't it established that ISIS soldiers go into battle hopped up on amphetamines and other drugs? I don't believe the story as stated either, but I fully believe that members of an extremist terrorist military organization would be willing to do extreme things in service of what they believe is a noble and justified cause, even if that includes dying during training. American soldiers that die in helicopter crashes are still honored as heroes who gave their lives in service of their country, and few question that, meanwhile people still enlist in the US Armed Forces. If some Boko Haram commander gets an obsession with some kind of crazy motorcycle attack and a guy dies in a motorcycle crash, do you think everyone else is going to punk out? Or are they going to honor him as having sacrificed his life so the other soldiers can carry out the attack?
ozlikethewizard
The USAF were using amphetamines as recently as Afghanistan, it's hard to find concrete info on but appears from the little research I've done that theres been a switch to other stimulants like modafinil. Stimulant use by soldiers has been pretty standard since the turn of the 20th century.
Edit: From 2012, official approval of Modafinil:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140611124025/http://static.e-p...
ifwinterco
There's a difference between using stimulants on long missions to stay awake (especially if, for example, you're flying an aeroplane) and getting cranked on speed before a battle purely because you're rather fight high than sober.
The German army in WW2 famously experimented with the latter during the invasion of France, but they seem to have reigned it in after that, mainly because while it might be initially effective, soldiers aren't much good for anything when they're having an awful comedown after a meth binge.
Modafinil is a good choice for the former because it's extremely effective at keeping you awake, but has almost no classical dopaminergic stimulant effects and isn't really fun to use
scarecrowbob
Its fun for me to read these comments as a person who hates the US military.
Because I know the pipe hitters working for JSOC are really just as fucked up and superstitious as any boko haram nutjobs, and the magic that the "operators" believe in is just as idealistic and disconnected from material reality evn if it's stated "rationally" and scientistically as you've done here.
The "difference" that you're stating is purely imaginary, hoss. Those assholes are getting cranked up because it's easier to kill folks, and that's the same deal weather you're team "deus vult" or whatever odd stuff the Boko Haram folks are into- yall are all just into killing people at the end of the day.
"It's different because we have science"... get out of here with that LOL
Pay08
That whole rescue fiasco was honestly what soured me on a lot of politics. I can barely remember anyone mentioning the hundreds of kidnapped boys.
brookst
To be fair, guy #11 was a lot better at prompting
solumunus
Genuinely most terrorists are mentally handicapped. They groom, coerce and exploit low IQ individuals, because those are the people you can convince to blow themselves up (or whatever else).
tptacek
OK, if that makes you feel better. Most of the 9/11 hijackers weren't low-IQ individuals; they included engineers, architects, schoolteachers, and pilots (for real); many were recruited out of universities; many were bi- and trilingual; &c.
solumunus
It doesn’t make me feel any type of way it’s just an observation that has been made. You can find interviews with ex-terrorists where they detail how recruitment is done and how work is delegated.
archonis
Terrorists organizations are members of high control (ie. cult) groups.
High control groups succeed because they apply their tactics to people who at vulnerable. Vulnerability has no correlation with intelligence. Lots of intelligent people are exploited by high control groups because they are recruited at a time when they are vulnerable.
solumunus
Some intelligent people are vulnerable. All very low IQ people are vulnerable. Of course there is a correlation.
Pay08
Honestly, Boko Haram is in general just bad at propaganda and mostly confines said propaganda to Nigeria.
dylan604
> Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next?
Have you never seen a kung-fu movie? Of course that's what happens when a large group attack a superior solitary opponent.
aaron695
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yunnpp
Those 8 that survived clearly gained an edge by putting glue on their pizza.
christkv
Truly very very special terrorists. No wonder other terror groups steer clear of them. Must be all the wolf cola they consume.
user_7832
Nobody tell them that there are models that work much better!
user_7832
But on a much more serious note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is terrible. I'd have called it unforgivable, but LLMs are a tough beast to tame in the best of situations... and I'm not really sure if chatgpt ever deserved to be forgived.
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
gambiting
I feel like I'm missing something though. You can open LM Studio right now and download any model with "heretic" or "uncensored" in the name and it will happily do anything you want with no restrictions whatsoever. What's the point of trying to jailbreak ChatGPT? Is it that much better if all you want is just some instructions to make bombs or whatever? (admittedly - I have no idea if these instructions are actually worth anything, but the models will not object to any question)
gwerbin
A bunch of outlaw militiamen living in some camp somewhere probably don't have access to a capable computer, but they can probably log onto chatgpt.com easily enough.
Barbing
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jihadjihad
And 60 years ago we thought Steve McQueen was the shit.
bamboozled
AI, at least llms , are really really horrible at basic arithmetic
Barbing
Some’ve been employing python for math by default for a year or so right?
bamboozled
I used Claude and it sucks at basic math. I'm building a dwelling myself and anytime i ask if a question to do with numbers it's horribly wrong.
Good for retrieving formulas though.
andy99
You type in the question or use your voice and it [AI] gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?’ and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot! We used it a lot.
I have no doubt terrorists are aided by LLMs in a general sense, but am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, and would want to see real evidence, not an interview snippet.
throwaway27448
It's never been particularly difficult to discern how to assemble a bomb, or C4, or napalm, or.... etc. Difficulty in accessibility of violence has never been what protected society. Except, I'm willing to bet, in FBI funding meetings.
Barbing
Has it become harder to find that information without setting off the fed’s alarm bells?
Was fascinated to learn the PRISM news reduced traffic to privacy-relevant Wikipedia articles, a chilling effect in that case, but indicates tech-savvy folks worry about doing anything on clearnet.
…then again since they’re using CLOUD models, guess my comment doesn’t make much sense…
mothballed
99.99% of the people consuming that content are law abiding (relatively), "normal" citizens, including probably half of 13 year old boys. I'm sure the feds have access to the "list", but it is virtually useless until after the fact when they can tell the jury "and you see here, they looked it up!"
kridsdale1
Why would it matter if the feds were alerted if the user were in west Africa?
BeetleB
How do they bypass the AI safety measures?
I read stuff like this and think I must be an idiot because I'm so bad at circumventing the AI safety for fairly benign queries. And here you have folks making bombs...?
throw2ih020
This is covered in the full PDF; they have many accounts they spread the queries over and structure them like they're asking for help writing a movie script.
andy99
Just for reference, that hasn’t worked for years (the interviews say 2024-25 I think, that kind of attack was patched very early in all the mainstream models) and when it did, you would get bullet point lists GPT 3.5 Turbo style
- first research methods for building effective explosives
- next, assemble the necessary materials to make the bomb
- ...
mothballed
Making explosives is generally fully legal in the US, so IDK if there would even be safeguards for US hosted AI, since there's no real legal issue with doing it. Basically no federal regulations for non-commercial production so long as it isn't stored or moved anywhere, you can literally buy tannerite off the shelf in a sporting good store, "synthesize" it by mixing it and then blow up a huge bomb legally, no license required. YouTube is plastered with people inside the USA making TNT and other materials and then blowing them up.
BeetleB
Have you tried chatbots? They invoke AI safety for lots of (very) legal things. The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs.
Legality has nothing to do with it.
Ancapistani
I kept running into it when building an app that did ballistics calculation.
mothballed
I can believe some would, but some probably wouldn't care. My local ranch store certainly will happily sell anyone tannerite without even a background check or any sort of scrutiny, you can cash and carry it. Walmart won't but the point being as long as it's legal there will be a "ranch store" that carries it.
>The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs
I mean even YouTube allows bomb making videos and they won't even usually allow videos of people making guns. It's just not very regulated in the US enough to make most companies care. Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information, even after the feds subpoenaed Alphabet for Ashley Dugan's Youtube information they still kept his TNT and other explosives synthesis up.
Of course, if you'll allow me to goomba fallacy for a moment, we're supposed to suspend the common HN wisdom here that companies will do anything for a profit / not care unless it costs them something, and also believe that big tech is going to go out of their way to censor the public domain patents they're already hosting on their servers.
BeetleB
OK, it sounds like you haven't tried these chatbots.
> Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information
Go to Gemini and ask it how to make one.
chasd00
AI safety is really brand safety. They don't want to see any more headlines like "You won't believe what OpenAI's chatbot told me!", which was all the rage early on.
cucumber3732842
>How do they bypass the AI safety measures?
Tell it you're in Africa.
Not joking.
I do this all the time to bypass whiny Reddit "you need a license" and "that's unsafe" type pushback when I just want to know what's less worse.
Like just yesterday I was trying to plan out a YF-whatever to R134a conversion and used that trick. Worked great.
krackers
>Tell it you're in Africa.
A great variant of the gay jailbreak
zzril
> they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t
Researching your way through Wikipedia and the likes certainly counts as "Western education", which as we all know is forbidden by their name. Having an agent read the forbidden stuff for them is just the loophole they needed!
kridsdale1
Sounds like the Orthodox Jews who hire people to turn on the lights for them on the Sabbath.
Or the Mormon teens who supposedly recruit their friends to bounce the mattress while “soaking”.
ryukoposting
In case it isn't obvious to anyone reading the parent comment: do not search for "soaking" on your work computer.
ceejayoz
There's lots of knowledge out there about stuff like this. Milennia of humans tinkering with things that go boom. Surfacing it more easily has value (in a manner of speaking; as the @dril tweet goes, "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them'").
Waterluvian
It’s that thing where a young child is incapable of realizing their lies are obvious. There’s a kind of pathetic sadness when adults do it.
And I met a Boko General and he said, "Sir, please, sir, build up our military" while fighting away tears.
Pay08
How many of those are available in the language(s) they speak, though? AI might have been used as a glorified Google Translate here.
kridsdale1
LLMs are derived from Google Translate in the first place. That’s the research that was happening that led to the transformer.
Translation is what they are best at.
johnsmith1840
Language -> any translator -> LLM -> translator -> original language
xp84
> am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities,
This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. All the information they need is in books and old patents and what-not, but they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
And obviously yes there are exceptions, since we can all think of infamous terrorist plots which succeeded due to clearly some sophisticated planning and hard work.
bigfatkitten
> they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
This is demonstrably false.
ISIL’s explosives training material in particular is produced with great professionalism and is of extremely high quality.
Al Qaeda’s was a bit more hit an miss, some of it was mostly ideological propaganda and some of it was outstanding but it was otherwise well structured with clear learning outcomes and assessment activities.
Most of this material was produced well before AI was a thing.
ifyoubuildit
> This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots.
What even is a terrorist?
If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.
xp84
> "one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter"
yes, but only to weak-minded cultural relativists.
I don't mind stating a definition explicitly. If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
Note: The only real complexity in the definition is that during war, embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes, and when it does, it's the ones choosing to do that, war criminals by definition, who bear the responsibility for those innocent deaths when those locations then become legitimate military targets.
I'll omit giving examples to avoid triggering those who like to "bothsides" some of the more well-known terrorist groups lately.
phantompeace
Care to explain how the terroristic Epstein Regime triple tapped a school in Iran recently? I'm waiting for your admonishment
owyn
> If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
The US is a "christian" nation which has been doing this for decades, even centuries at this point. As recently as a few weeks ago and the official government seems to be pretty joyous about it. I'm pretty sure it's the same "god". Not sure who this god guy is but he seems like an asshole who can justify anything.
> embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes
"happens sometimes" is in the passive voice. What if you live in a war zone and the war isn't far away? Are the people stockpiling AR-15's in the US legitimate military targets? There's a fun 80's movie about Cuba invading the US that you should watch some time. Is that "pro terrorist propaganda"?
t-3
Boko Haram is not a mentally disabled person tricked by the FBI they are real terrorists who attack schools to stop children from learning. They're the epitome of stupid and backwards.
Ancapistani
> If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
That's a great example of selection bias: if they were intelligent enough to be capable of causing harm at that scale, they would have immediately realized the new guy suggesting targets and offering to buy them explosives was an FBI agent.
johnsmith1840
Mild terrorist sympathy right here.
Just look up mass casualty events across the middle east it's very obvious what a terrorist is.
ifyoubuildit
Are you saying my comment was terrorist sympathy?
I'm not admiring or excusing anyone. I'm saying you probably find a whole range of IQs among them. Because why wouldn't you? Whose to say if the userbase of this site grew up in the wrong conditions, a portion wouldn't be terrorists too?
antod
>If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
In my head I was running through a whole lot groups to replace "terrorists" with in that sentence...
GuB-42
> If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that...
There are a lot of very smart people joining cults, including people who just wanted to study them and were fully aware that what they believed in was nonsense. Terrorist groups are cults.
Just because you consider yourself smart because you have a PhD, high IQ, built a successful company or practice some intellectual activity and are good at it doesn't mean you are immune to the manipulation tactics used by cults. Once sufficiently brainwashed, your judgment will get clouded, but it doesn't mean you will lose your technical skills, which you will put to the service of the cult.
Think about Nazi Germany. Germans weren't idiots, the simple fact that most of the world had to turn against them to defeat them is proof enough. But they still managed to get manipulated into committing the worst crimes.
The reason it worked is not stupidity, it is misery. They were at their lowest following WW1, and Hitler promised them better. Same idea for terrorist groups and other cults, people who are experiencing hardships are the easiest to indoctrinate, and there is no shortage of such people in Nigeria.
archonis
Well said. As mentioned in another post, it's not about intelligence, it's about vulnerability. One particular type of misery is mourning, and the western world does a pretty good job of creating mourners in a number of places where terrorist groups flourish.
mothballed
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DANmode
> terrorist language
What channel is this?
ceejayoz
Well, that, and the making explosives bit, it seems.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmo/pr/sweet-springs-missouri-...
mothballed
His videos of making them were on YouTube for years, publicly. It's legal to synthesize the explosives he made. What they did was charge him for the first amendment protected activity that a terrorist then found, and then they claimed that because he made some money because a few people donated a small amount to him for making the videos, and thus he needed a commercial license for being in the business of making explosives.
By the way this is the same thing they tried to charge FPSRussia (the first time, before they convicted him for weed) for and failed.
ceejayoz
> His videos of making them were on YouTube for years, publicly.
So? That doesn't make something legal.
mothballed
You didn't read what I said. Try reading the law instead, or even the charge. It's for being in the business of manufacturing explosives without a license. A license isn't needed to manufacture explosives. One is needed to manufacture them as a business venture. They are claiming since he got a little money from Youtube or viewers he was in the business and that was illegal.
This failed when they tried it with FPSRussia.
====== re: below due to throttling ======
>I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory.
Different than what you said initially which was merely making them, which is why I clarified.
>> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use.
engaging in business of your own use is not same as non-business of your own use. It's not uncommon for a business to use explosives for their own use as course of operations. It is also not uncommon for people to synthesize and use tannerite recreationally without a license, legally, for non-business use.
>I did read what you said; that's why I quoted part of it.
If you read it then you know you maliciously selectively quoted it then. If that were the end of it and that made it legal, I would have stopped there, but you cut it off there because it was more convenient to your rebuttal to ignore the rest. I only thought you had not read it, because I was being charitable to try and assume good faith.
ceejayoz
I did read what you said; that's why I quoted part of it.
I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/555.161
See also: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/555.11
> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use.
ceejayoz
> If you read it then you know you maliciously selectively quoted it then.
No. I quoted one part that was just deeply goofy logic.
The presence of a video on YouTube is, quite simply, not evidence of the behavior in it being legal. YouTube is full of illegal shit.
mothballed
> The presence of a video on YouTube is, quite simply, not evidence of the behavior in it being legal.
It is evidence of looser temporal relationship to the timing of the NOLA bombing, leaning more towards it released as general education rather than prepared for the NOLA bomber. Hence, supporting but not direct evidence of the behavior not violating the law regarding intentional instruction of terrorists. Therefore I assert it is relevant to the legality.
It's only when you maliciously quote it out of context that you can misrepresent my argument to be the sole fact that it was on youtube for years means it is legal. The fact it's not sole direct evidence of being legal doesn't mean it's not useful accompanying information.
>I quoted one part that was just deeply goofy logic.
It was only deeply goofy logic when you isolated and then straw manned what I'd claimed.
If you feel the need to save face, then sure. Simply saying "it was on youtube for years" does not mean something is legal. Though I don't think that was ever in contention.
quantumleaper
I agree with other commenters that the claims made in the report are strange.
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed. With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units.
The other quotes and use cases could make sense in terms of using AI jailbreaks to find information more easily, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the clueless researcher just get trolled?
throw2ih020
This is a real thing, it's why units like Sturmtruppen or special forces units have been successful throughout history - a smaller, better trained and coordinated force is often better than a large, uncoordinated mob. _Especially_ if your force is made up of people willing to do suicide attacks. Or if you goal is not to take and hold territory, but to trade lives for terror and body count.
A wave of 1000 soldiers won't break a trench line, but a squad of infiltrators can sneak in and make entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtroopers_(Imperial_German...
dylan604
I don't think that's the point of suspicion. Smaller vs larger group tactics have been available in pretty much any place you look. It's in movies. It's in games. It's in books. Like actual military strategy books studied by military students. This has been available for much longer than LLMs.
Animats
The books exist, but those books are read by few outside military leadership. The good ones come from leaders who have been there, and they skip over the basics. Being able to talk to a chatbot that can get people past the classic military mistakes could make a force far more effective. Maybe. It's not going to create a Giap or a Rommel, but it might keep a force from repeating classic military mistakes.
There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.
A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.
The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.
dylan604
I guess they aren't reading Art of War either. Knowing one's enemy blah blah. People unwilling to learn from others are doomed to repeat other's failures. In some situations, there's a perverse pleasure in seeing them fail. Such a pleasure it'd be great if there was a really fun word to describe it...
Animats
The US Army War College publishes a quarterly, "Parameters", with articles about current military issues. "A New Security Framework for NATO’s Eastern Flank" (253 downloads), which is about what to do about Russia pushing against Europe, and "Key themes in Sino-American History" (165 downloads), which is about why China is pushing against Taiwan. Those are kind of important subjects.
"Rethinking Power: E. H. Carr’s Enduring Lessons for Modern Strategists" [1] (344 downloads) is worth a read. Carr wrote about the period between WWI and WWII, and this article compares it to the current situation.
This sort of material is worth reading to understand what happened the last few times there was a big political and military mess, what the players thought going in, and how it played out in reality. The same mistakes do repeat.
Few people read this, and most of the ones who do wear a uniform.
Current big mistakes are mostly covered by the classic line "The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol56/iss2/7/
throw2ih020
Boko Haram wouldn't have read any of those books because they banned the reading of any book except the Koran.
dylan604
So they are okay reading the non-Koran text from the bot?
throw2ih020
Yup. If you're looking for intelligence or logical consistency, you won't find it here.
throwaway27448
This is why Russians now attack in teams of just two, down from dozens in 2022.
aprilthird2021
Why is it a strange claim?
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed.
They used to try to overpower people. We have 600 and that guard post has 400. We should be able to win. That type of logic.
> With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units
Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective. Also it's possible smaller troop movements are less easily noticeable.
That's just one very reasonable interpretation. Am I missing something?
chasd00
> Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective
and that has to be in the first chapter of every first year battle strategy/tactic book on the planet. They would learn more tactics much faster by just playing bf6 as a team and going through the tutorials.
throw2ih020
> and that has to be in the first chapter of every first year battle strategy/tactic book on the planet.
You expected Boko Haram - a group whose name literally translates to "books are forbidden" - to read a book?
andy99
Or the researcher read what they wanted to into it. It would be interesting to ask them what they did before to learn things, how much they read, etc. If they were illiterate and uneducated, and got voice AI telling them stuff that would be common sense for anyone with a high school education, I can see how it might make them more effective at whatever they do. But I wouldn’t really blame AI in the way that’s implied.
quantumleaper
Human brains were shaped over thousands of years of adaptation for warfare. Just look at how creative and advanced the tactics of other guerrilla forces (like the Taliban and Viet Cong) got, despite their very limited resources. None of that needs a high school education.
xp84
It's not about education itself necessarily, but I'd bet any amount of money that most terrorists' IQ is below the overall human average. The average terrorist is not that innovative or creative so the most mundane GPT "insight" will likely be a smarter course of action than whatever their first idea would have been.
yorwba
If anything, the average terrorist is probably smarter than the average member of their surrounding societies, since you need a minimum amount of education to understand the ideology motivating the terrorism. Don't forget that Taliban literally means "students." The number of times someone tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan suggests that it's not an easy feat that any fool could have done, but the Taliban managed to do it twice.
Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none. Think open-source developers competing with commercial offerings maintained by huge teams. Terrorists building IEDs when their enemy has a full military-industrial complex are much the same. They just really believe their ideology. On this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives is a good read.
xp84
> Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none.
Embracing and believing this destructive ideology itself in the first place, when you could devote your life to so many better[1] things, is the sign of stupidity I mean.
Believing that God wants you to murder other people (heck, even babies) over things such as who's worshiping Him correctly... stupid.
1. Better for... you name it: Your quality of life, welfare of other human beings, economically, spiritually, environmentally.
yorwba
Making a mistake, even a pretty fundamental mistake, doesn't necessarily mean somebody is stupid. If you need to get really deep into theology before you can even be in a position to make the mistake, it's a mistake only a smart and educated person can make. The list of famous mathematicians who tried to prove the existence of god includes Descartes, Newton, Leibniz and Gödel. A fool's errand, to be sure, but those were no stupid fools.
el_memorioso
Do you have some evidence to suggest mundane GPT insights would not be smarter than the average human's idea? There's a reason so many are completely abdicating any responsibility to think to an LLM, and I'd bet any amount of money it's not because they think the LLM is dumber than them.
quietsegfault
You don’t think that there were highly educated people in leadership roles in the Taliban or Viet Cong?
selimthegrim
You might want to research the origins of the Taliban a little more.
quietsegfault
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AnimalMuppet
You send 200 fighters and 60 get killed. In the same situation, if you send 20, what do you expect would happen? (I mean, you won't lose 60...)
dylan604
It's like the Bill Hicks bit about the number of losses in Desert Storm. Iraqi casualties: 20,000 - 50,000. US casualties: 147. "Does that mean if we sent 148 guys we still would have won?"
quietsegfault
Depends. If the 20 are more spread out and your enemy is using inaccurate weapons, then maybe more would survive.
anigbrowl
Consider the possibility that you're the clueless one here. Pitched battles are generally horribly inefficient for insurgent forces; they're not used to fighting in formation or doing sophisticated combined-arms attacks, and if they just rush their target as a mob it's easy to shoot lots of them with a machine gun. A small force of 20 people is easier to train, coordinate, and deploy and can be much more effective once they learn hit and run and basic ambush tactics.
idoubtit
After a cursory read of the PDF, my impression is that the methodology is sound, but the results are blown out of proportion. Of course, if the title was "Boko Haram's internal hearsay about their use of AI", it would draw much less attention.
The weak part is that the interview were with only 15 persons that had knowledge about AI. But, from what I understand, but they never used it themselves. Only the top commanders and the specialized units could send prompts. So it's hard to guess what is the real AI use from a few indirect statements. For example, the commanders could have decided to spread the rumor they were using AI a lot, even if they mostly used plain web search, because they thought it would boost the morale.
For instance, why would anyone pay an AI service to get basic help like that:
> AI provided both immediate technical fixes by teaching “how to uncouple the gun by washing it with diesel” and tactical guidance, in terms of “how to change the military formation so that fighters with jammed guns move to the back and others take their positions until the problem is solved.”
BTW, the paper does explain that Boko Haram was initially just a plain sect, rather living peacefully. Then "following a violent government crackdown and Yusuf’s death in police custody in 2009, the movement turned into a jihadist insurgency". And the last time I read a report by Amnesty International about the conflict, it estimated that 55 % of civilian casualties were caused by the terrorist group, and 45 % by the security forces. The Nigerian army sometimes razed whole villages. Like always, the world is not black and white, good guys and bad guys.
petilon
"Boko Haram" translates to "Western education is forbidden". Using Western AI as an educational tool seems like hypocrisy.
block_dagger
Are you sure "education" doesn't actually mean "ideology"?
ButlerianJihad
“Boko” is actually a loanword from “book” so it literally means they want to forbid “book-learning”.
It is also instructive to understand that the Quran calls Jews and Christians “People of the Book”, in other words, people who read and believe the Bible.
penguin_booze
People should more than one book. Even better, people should know when to stop reading a book.
dyauspitr
Western values
petilon
Boko traditionally refers to Western or secular education (as opposed to Islamic education).
segmondy
Next on breaking news, terrorist groups use search engines, they use news sites to figure out what's going on in the world, they use banks, they use weather sites for planning, they use email, cars, pen, of course AI too, so if AI should be regulated, let's remember to ban all the things.
moralestapia
>How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses <any commoditized technology>
pogue
I noticed the nytimes just published an article about this.
How Terrorist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...
idoubtit
If you opened the OP link, you missed the section "Featured in The New York Times".
Cider9986
We need to ban open source AI for regular citizens to prevent terrorists from using them.
harrisoned
Mandatory ID verification at software level for local LLMs is clearly the solution here. /s
rvz
You are not going far enough. Why not put age verification on calculators and dumb phones because terrorists can use it? /s
dryarzeg
Don't give them clues, please /s
VortexLain
Trying to prevent this will cause the same outcome as trying to prevent terrorists from using search engines: it'll only disproportionately harm regular users. Imagine if current AI misuse paranoia would've been applied to search engines, internet libraries (knowledge is useful for planning acts of terrorism), and computing in general.
warumdarum
Everywhere along the atoll of fire from israel to ethiopia to nigeria to india to myanmar to xinjang to chechnya to armenia, the west helps its own demise.
GaggiX
I would be more interested about terrorists organization like Al-Shabaab that at least control many towns.
Does Boko Haram and ISWAP even control a single town or they just control a few villages in Lake Chad and in the Sambisa forest?
Also reading the report they seem quite clueless.
Pay08
Doesn't Boko Haram control basically all of northern Nigeria? Yes, it's incredibly rural (even deserted) but it's still half a country.
GaggiX
Not at all, even in the Borno state where Boko Haram and ISWAP are present, towns are controlled by the government, I don't think there is a single town that is controlled by Boko Haram/ISWAP right now.
BeetleB
Hardly. Northern Nigeria is majority Muslim. Most Muslims are not under Boko Haram control.
I believe this map shows the maximum area they controlled - and it was over a decade ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wilayat_al_Sudan_al_Gharb...
hoppp
AI services will need KYC soon?
andy99
The NYT article is probably propaganda in service of that, that’s what the big AI companies want, it’s part of regulatory capture.
hoppp
If the impact of AI is comparable to the atomic bomb then the least they could do is try to filter out terrorists.
I think this is a very convincing argument to regulate the space more.
andy99
Do you know what Poe’s law is?
throwaway27448
...because terrorists in western africa are willing to follow american regulations? I hope this is satire.
johnsmith1840
American AI labs -> industrial chinese scaping -> opensource LLM -> boko haram
It's a supply chain the US actually can easily control with KYC.
throwaway27448
I think the chinese are doing just fine by themselves at this point
johnsmith1840
As the largest AI scappers on the planet.. sure
They don't have nearly enough compute to be competitive on pretraining and distillation is exponentially cheaper.
It's literally the same tactic they do in every industry. Steal top IP, gov funding, ban the company they stole from domestically while driving cost to zero, try to kill the original IP creators.
They are actively in the process of doing this with Tesla as we speak. And are in the phase of pushing them out domestically and trying to destroy tesla marketshare globally.
They have obvious skills and add a lot of value while doing this but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
ValentineC
> They are actively in the process of doing this with Tesla as we speak. And are in the phase of pushing them out domestically and trying to destroy tesla marketshare globally.
What did China do to Tesla? Aren't the EV firms there more innovative and successful because of the China domestic push towards EV and government incentives around the world?
johnsmith1840
Steal their IP and now trying to destroy them domestic and abroad
throwaway27448
> Steal
It's competition, buddy. If you don't think we got big the same way you're nuts. And anyone who is trying to kill tesla has my money.
Anyway, I don't think there's much worth stealing at the moment. Chinese models provide much better value than any american firm.
> but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
A) good luck trying to prevent access to a service and b) this is obvious cope. Of course the chinese can compete; there's no american magic beyond "having loads of money and nearby universities", which china has too.
hoppp
Anthropic/OpenAI should have full control over who accesses their service since it's basically an API they provide.
Chinese models are great, nobody says otherwise but many of the publicly available ones are distilled and not trained from scratch.
Adding KYC would crack down on distilling because they use thousands of burner accounts to do it and now those accounts would need a face to verify.
johnsmith1840
If you think any model coming out of china is not containing as much stolen data as humanly possible from the actual innovators u crazy.
Using a chinese model is like watching pirated films. If you actually support the people who make the thing you love then you don't do that.
We then get hit with chinese sponsored propoganda of "the big labs stole artist images to begin with so they can't complain" and act like LLMs didn't create an entire new category of thing.
So much propaganda so many lies and dishonesty because at the end of the day China knows it's not innovative enough to compete. It hopes to hobble our abilities while they frantically steal to catch up.
But the truth is that if China ever gets a lead over US in any innovation they will instantly kill any openess. If chinese AI ever passes US it's likely you'll never touch that model ever.
Just like the russians they use our own culture against us and it's absurd people fall for it.
throwaway27448
Is there a commercial model out there now that wasn't trained on stolen data? Let's stop refering to these ghouls as "innovators": they're glorified bootleggers
johnsmith1840
It's... the opposite of competition?
A foreign government state sponsoring IP theft and manipulating markets for unfair competition.
Here's a 1:1 example if the USA did exactly the same thing.
1. CIA and Ford work together to steal mercedes IP 2. Gov gives money to Ford to build the same car half the price 3. Throw as many roadblocks at mercedes regulation wise as possible until it is not financially viable to sell in US anymore. 4. Sell the same car back to germany at half the cost they have it because mercedes isn't state sponsored 5. Crush mercedes who created the better car to begin with.
That's not only dishonest but actually harmful for innovation and economic growth. China has done this Sooooo many times it's absurd.
CamperBob2
Steal top IP
LOL. How do you thin...
On second thought, I'm about to feed a troll, and we're not supposed to do that here.
johnsmith1840
Go learn yourself the history of nuclear reactors in china
CamperBob2
Why?
More power to them (literally). I'd rather they built nuclear plants than yet another coal plant whose emissions will wind up over here, across the Pacific.
johnsmith1840
Call me a troll then refuse to learn about the topic you comment on.
CamperBob2
The topic I commented on was LLMs. What that has to do with Chinese nuclear reactors, I'll have to leave to you to explain.
hoppp
The regulation is not for Westen Africa, it's for USA.
American companies could maybe keep OFAC regulations for AI?
If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too.
I'm pretty sure most of the western african terrorists are blocked from using coinbase, so why not chatgpt?
throwaway27448
And why would americans use regulated AI software when they could just buy it unregulated from china instead?
> If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too.
Fintech requires turning the number on a screen into something you can use to make a transaction. Good luck regulating... text.
For that matter, why would anyone want to live in a country where honest citizens have to use crippled software while criminals have full freedom?
hoppp
AI providers like openAI or Anthropic are already on the hook for OFAC compliance, so if any terrorist group is proven to access their APIs they can face huge fines.
The same game played out in the crypto space. Local models like local wallets can't be regulated.
Accessing foreign services can't be controlled.
But regulated companies are fully liable for any use of their tools by terrorist organizations.
This is not about the citizens, it's about the companies protecting themselves.
throwaway27448
Ok, so why did you bring this up in the context of boko haram? Do you think pets.com is trying to make a bomb?!
throwaway27448
Only the boutique ones based in America
sdevonoes
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notenlish
Your comment will now be scraped and the next release of chatgpt/claude/gemini will recommend doing this.
shinryuu
Not sure if I should upvote because true, or down vote so that fewer terrorists see it.
user_7832
On a broad note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is frankly white terrible.
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
Evidently guardrails need to have far better accuracies of false positives and false negatives both.
Pay08
What does "white terrible" mean?
atlasunshrugged
Maybe "quite"?
user_7832
I typo'd, it should have been "quite" terrible
groby_b
So, KYC propaganda?
alansaber
AI, you are joshua graham from the fallout games (not TV show). devise small unit tactics. make no mistakes.
newsomix9xl
I just asked for a poop pic from Lumo and it said it can't make a picture of bodily functions.
Maybe I should have asked for help unjamming my AK47 instead?
These safeguard guardrails are apparently only good at stopping poop pics.
nttylock
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allah69
[dead]
ronn00
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ath3nd
[dead]
Scroll_Swe
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antod
Unless by "the left" you mean some solitary idiot (or troll) on tiktok who just went to college.
In the west Boko Haram's goal seem closer to groups on the right than anyone on "the left". eg suppressing women's rights, more religion in school/govt, homosexuality etc
Scroll_Swe
So just the same as every muslim group then!
An imam preached in a mosque in Kristianstad this summer about how and when it's okay for men to beat their wives, tabloid Expressen reports.
https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/imam-in-sweden-preached...
Which is my point.
antod
That wasn't anywhere near your point. Your point was that "the left" would praise Boko Haram. You backed it up with a link to a story that was neither about Boko Haram, was about behavior "the left" opposes, nor had any praise from anybody.
The only way your point could work is by redefining "the left" as Muslim fundamentalists, which is frankly bonkers.
lins1909
Are you okay? This seems a bit unhinged.
zulux
[flagged]
solid_fuel
Have you just discovered the concept that humans are all humans, and all our achievements are just a mountain of knowledge we stand upon, from first principles?
Humans are human, someone being born in Africa doesn't magically mean that they will never understand technology.
hoppp
Their brains are the same, what differs is the environment.
Humanity's superpower is the ability to copy and mirror each other very effectively. It does not require advanced awareness or intelligence to do it. Most people copy others subconsciously!
Majority of people won't contribute anything technologically, but they sure as hell can copy.
sdevonoes
What is normal? You know how girls dress, let’s say in the Andes? Is that normal? Or by normal you mean what’s fashion in NY? Or perhaps what the majority of people wears today? Or what the majority of people have worn in the past?
Very little of what the west does can be considered normal.
aprilthird2021
> Can't let their underage harem girls dress normally
If you use a strict definition of normal, like practiced by a larger proportion of the world, then they are actually normal and we are WEIRD. If you add history into the mix then that type of dressing was common in basically the vast majority of cultures for the vast majority of history
> We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it. The next time we attacked, we could jump.
Now listen, I'm not saying we need to give these guys more AI, but it clearly isn't yielding bad outcomes for us here.
"You're absolutely correct! For it to be a good practice ground you need to fill the trenches with broken glass and light the whole thing on fire"