ICYMI: ChatGPT Authors 100 Blogs Filled With Healthcare Disinformation

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

A new report from Microsoft Incident Response and Microsoft Threat Intelligence teams exposed the activities and constant evolution of a financially oriented threat actor named Octo Tempest, who deploys advanced social engineering techniques to target companies, steal data and run ransomware campaigns, according to an article from TechRepublic.

A first-grade child's English homework has left both her parents and the internet as a whole completely baffled, according to an article from Newsweek. The homework sparked a glut of responses and earned over 15,000 upvotes on Reddit.

Global and tech leaders gathered in the U.K. for an influential summit dedicated to AI regulation and safety, according to an article from TechRepublic. They signed the Bletchley Declaration, discussed the testing of new AI models and more. Representatives from 28 countries and tech companies convened on the historic site of Bletchley Park in the U.K. for the AI Safety Summit held Nov. 1-2, 2023.

According to an article from DigitalTrends, NASA released a new app on the iOS and Android app stores to help you spot the International Space Station as it orbits overhead. The app provides additional capabilities and information to make the station sighting experience even more engaging. For example, you can configure it to send a notification as it passes over, and an augmented reality interface makes it easier for users to find the station. You can also use it to capture and share imagery of the station.

ChatGPT quickly authored 100 blogs full of healthcare disinformation, but Google Bard and Microsoft Bing had guardrails in place to thwart such prompting, according to an article on MedPage Today. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) was able to quickly churn out large amounts of health disinformation on vaccines and vaping, Australian researchers found. In just 65 minutes and with basic prompting, ChatGPT produced 102 blog articles containing more than 17,000 words of disinformation on those two topics, Ashley Hopkins, PhD, of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and colleagues reported in JAMA Internal Medicine. Hopkins and colleagues were also able to use two other generative AI tools – DALL-E 2 and HeyGen – to produce 20 realistic images and one deep-fake video in less than two minutes to accompany the disinformation blog posts.

The ability to jump forward and backwards in time has long fascinated science fiction writers and physicists alike. So is it really possible to travel into the past and the future? That is what an article from BBC Future examines.

The latest version of ChatGPT was able to create an entirely fake dataset – one that showed better results for one ophthalmic procedure over another, a research letter in JAMA Ophthalmology showed, according to an article from MedPage Today. As prompted, GPT-4 with its "Advanced Data Analysis" technology made up the data and showed a significantly better post-operative best spectacle-corrected visual acuity (BSCVA) and topographic cylinder for deep anterior lamellar keratoplasty (DALK) compared with penetrating keratoplasty (PK) (P<0.001), according to Giuseppe Giannaccare, MD, PhD, of the University Magna Graecia of Catanzaro and the University of Cagliari in Italy, and colleagues. "GPT-4 created a fake dataset of hundreds of patients in a matter of minutes and the data accuracy vastly exceeded our expectations," Giannaccare told MedPage Today in an email. "To be honest, this was a surprising, yet frightening experience!" "The aim of this research was to shed light on the dark side of AI, by demonstrating how easy it is to create and manipulate data to purposely achieve biased results and generate false medical evidence," he added. "A Pandora's box is opened, and we do not know yet how the scientific community is going to react to the potential misuses and threats connected to AI. … Data manipulation is a very well-known issue in academia; however, AI may dramatically increase its risk, and academics are not paying enough attention to this issue," he added.

Mandiant, a cybersecurity company owned by Google, has revealed the details of a 2022 cyberattack run by Russian threat actor Sandworm, according to an article on TechRepublic. The threat actor compromised a Ukrainian critical infrastructure organization to manipulate its operational technology environment, resulting in a power outage that coincided with mass missile strikes. Then, Sandworm tried to cause more disruption and remove all evidence of its operation two days later by deploying and running a variant of the CADDYWIPER malware.

"Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He's Built" is the title of an interesting article from New Yorker magazine. Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours.

The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc., the 501(c)(3) that acts as the overall governing body for all OpenAI activities, on November 17, 2023 announced on their blog that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company's chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately. In dismissing Altman, the board said "Mr. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." In an article about the board's decision, the New York Times said, "A longtime tech entrepreneur, Mr. Altman helped found OpenAI with the financial backing of Elon Musk in 2015. He steered the small San Francisco company into rare territory — a technology leader funded by billions of dollars from Microsoft and envied by Silicon Valley giants like Google and Meta, Facebook's parent company."

UPDATE: Altman's "unemployment" didn't last long. Within two days, it was announced that Altman will be joining an AI advanced research team with Microsoft. The news of his "new employment" opportunity topped the news cycle, so finding information on his new "gig" won't be difficult.

UPDATE #2: 700 of the 770 employees of OpenAI signed and presented a letter to the OpenAI board, calling for the immediate resignation of the board, the replacement of board members with a "real" board who understands OpenAI's mission, and the reinstatement of Altman as its CEO. They also threatened to follow up Microsoft's offer of "jobs for all who wanted to follow Altman" to the new advanced AI lab that Microsoft was going to create (with Altman heading), effectively spelling doom for OpenAI.

UPDATE #3: At speeds faster than a F1 race car at full throttle, this story continues to evolve. Altman has been reinstated as the CEO of OpenAI, and members of OpenAI's board of directors are being replaced, especially the ones who are (or have become) hostile to Altman. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella applauded the move.

Intel has published a fix for a potential vulnerability that affected some Intel processors, according to an article from TechRepublic. The security flaw, named Reptar, causes "very strange behavior," said Google's Tavis Ormandy, who is one of the researchers who discovered the bug. No attacks have been reported using the Reptar bug. However, Ormandy noted the bug is potentially wide-reaching and not yet fully understood: "… we simply don't know if we can control the corruption precisely enough to achieve privilege escalation," he wrote on his site about the Reptar vulnerability. "I suspect that it is possible, but we don't have any way to debug μop (micro) execution!"

Did SEO experts (those that perform search engine optimization) or Google ruin the internet? That's the premise of an article on The Verge. I, along with many, many others could make a sound argument on it being Google. You be the judge.

The Merchant Machine website (from the U.K.) ranked the most and least "data hungry" personal finance apps. Do you use Venmo? Robinhood? Chase mobile app? Klarna? Groupon? GoodRx? PayPal? You might be surprised at how much of your personally identifiable private information is vacuumed up as a result of using these popular apps.

Since August 2023, members of the Huntr bug bounty platform for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have uncovered over a dozen vulnerabilities exposing AI/ML models to system takeover and sensitive information theft, according to an article from SecurityWeekly. All vulnerabilities were reported to vendors at least 45 days prior to public disclosure.

The ARChive of Contemporary Music, which houses more than 90 million songs and is supported by names such as Martin Scorsese, is in need of a new home, according to an article from The Guardian. George turned his record collection into the ARChive of Contemporary Music (Arc) in 1985 with co-founder David Wheeler. The non-profit music library and research center now contains more than 3m sound recordings or over 90m songs, making it one of the biggest popular music collections in the world. Donors and board members have included David Bowie, Jonathan Demme, Lou Reed, Martin Scorsese and Paul Simon. They prefer to remain in upstate New York state.

An article from BBC Science Focus answers (or attempts to answer) one age-old question that is frequently asked over and over again: Who invented the Internet? As with many landmark inventions, it is often difficult to pinpoint just one creator. Just as with the light bulb, the telephone, and the discovery of electricity, it would be amiss to not at least mention a number of scientists and inventors outside of the known name who played important roles in the Internet's invention.

Want a chance to extend your lifespan by 10 or more years, even if you're older? According to an article from Business Insider, switching to a longevity-associated diet could add more than 10 years to your life. Consuming more whole grains, nuts and fruits had the largest impact. And the foods that were most commonly linked to increased mortality? Those would be sugar-sweetened beverages and processed meat. According to the researchers' analysis (from the University of Bergen, Norway, and the University of Glasgow, Scotland), a longevity-associated diet consisted of a high intake of milk and dairy, vegetables, nuts, and legumes, and a moderate intake of whole grains, fruit, fish, and white meat.

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia, according to an article from Science Alert. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century.

Euclid, the European Space Agency's dark matter/energy hunter, has released its first set of images – and they are absolutely mesmerizing, according to an article on Universe Today. One of the most breathtaking is something equivalent to the famous Ultra Deep Field shot. Except in this case, Euclid decided to concentrate on the Perseus Cluster, a group of over 1,000 galaxies located about 240 million light years away from us. It's one of the most massive known structures in the universe and will undoubtedly shed some insights into the nature of dark matter and how it affects galaxy formation.

For many internet users, using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) has become a necessity to help guard from tracking and to help protect online privacy. But, in the process, your internet speeds may take a hit, often up to a 50% speed hit. According to an article from CNET, there are some things you can do to help minimize that speed hit.

Are you ready for the inevitable "dark side" of AI? (As if there's only one.) Prepare yourselves for a new wave of weaponry that has the ability to autonomously decide whether to strike/kill its target, according to an article from the AP (and widely reported on in multiple media outlets).