Rob Wiblin

Why should we expect it to be possible at all to tell which country or what actor produced a given...

I guess at the moment we would like to be able to tell if essays written by students were made by AI or not.

But it's incredibly hard to do that because obviously the models are designed to mimic human writing as much as possible.

And you can try to ask them explicitly, like mimic this other person's writing.

Why should we expect that a particular signature of a particular country or a particular source should be something that they can't evade leaving in there?

Well, if it's really far away- It has no natural precursors that are nearby an evolution space, then we basically know it had to come- It has to be deliberate or a lab leak.

I see.

I mean...

I guess you're saying it's true that probably at the limit, potentially, where everyone just has this incredible capability, we might not be able to tell who exactly gave the instruction to the LM to produce this sequence.

But given that only a small range of actors are interested in doing this at all, if you add in some other intelligence collection, then maybe you could basically figure it out pretty quickly.

I mean, I suppose at the moment...

You know, if a biological weapon was released in Ukraine, we might have a pretty good idea who did it.

And if at any point a biological weapon is released and one country happens to have the countermeasure, happens to already have the vaccine to inoculate their population, you might again have a pretty good idea who made it.

No, no, you don't agree?

I guess this might be too classified for any of us to know, but how good do you think our intelligence collection is on the Russian biological weapons program or the Iranian or North Korean?

I mean, I think there's the fact that we currently have relatively poor computer security.

I think creates a degree of transparency between large governments in the world.

There are enough breaches of their own networks that if they were engaging in a massive biological weapons program, it might be quite hard to make sure that another major power never got any sign of that.

Although I think the Soviets did manage, I guess this was a pre-computer era, so they managed to keep their bioweapons program.

I think the US didn't know until after the Cold War had ended.