619. How to Poison the A.I. Machine
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There's an old saying that I'm sure you've heard, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But imitation can easily tip into forgery. In the art world, there have been many talented forgers over the years. The Dutch painter Han van Meegeren, a master forger of the 20th century, was so good that his paintings were certified and sold, often to Nazis, as works by Johan Vermeer, a 17th century Dutch master. Now there is a new kind of art forgery happening and the perpetrators are machines. I recently got back from San Francisco, the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom. I was out there to do a live show, which you may have heard in our feed, and also to attend the annual American Economic Association Conference. Everywhere you go in San Francisco, there are billboards for AI companies. The conference itself was similarly blanketed.
There were sessions called Economic Implications of AI, Artificial Intelligence and Finance, and Large Language Models and Generative AI. The economist Erik Brynjolfsson is one of the leading scholars in this realm, and we borrowed him for our live show to hear his views on AI.
The idea is that, you know, AI is doing these amazing things, but we want to do it in service of humans and make sure that we keep humans at the center of all of that.
The day after Brynjolfsson came on our show, I attended one of his talks at the conference. It was called Will AI Save Us or Destroy Us? He cited a book by the Oxford computer scientist Michael Wooldridge called A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. Brynjolfsson read from a list of problems that Wooldridge said AI was nowhere near solving. Here are a few of them. Understanding a story and answering questions about it. Human level automated translation. Interpreting what is going on in a photograph. As Brynjolfsson is reading this list from the lectern, you're thinking, wait a minute, AI has solved all those problems, hasn't it? And that's when Brynjolfsson gets to his punchline. The Wooldridge book was published way back in 2021.
The pace of AI's advance has been astonishing, and some people expect it to supercharge our economy. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated economic growth over the current decade of around 1.5% a year. Erik Brynjolfsson thinks that AI could double that. He argues that many views of AI are either too fearful or too narrow.
Too many people think of machines as just trying to imitate humans. But machines can help us do new things we never could have done before. And so we want to look for ways that machines can complement humans, not simply imitate or replace them.
So that sounds promising. But what about the machines that are just imitating humans? What about machines that are essentially high-tech forgers? Today on Freakonomics Radio, we will hear from someone who is trying to thwart these machines on behalf of artists.
They take decades to hone their skill. So when that's taken against their will, that is sort of identity theft.
Ben Zhao is a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. He is by no means a techno pessimist, but he is not so bullish on artificial intelligence.
There is an exceptional level of hype. That bubble is in many ways in the middle of bursting right now.
But Zhao isn't just waiting for the bubble to burst. It's already too late for that. Because the harms that are happening to people is in real time. Zhao and his team have been building tools to prevent some of those harms. When it comes to stolen art, the tool of choice is a dose of poison that Zhao slips into the AI system. There is another old saying you probably know. It takes a thief to catch a thief. How does that work in the time of AI? Let's find out.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
Ben Zhao and his wife Heather Zhang are both computer scientists at the University of Chicago, and they run their own lab.
We call it the SAN Lab. Which stands for? Security, algorithms, networking, and data. Most of the work that we do has been to use technology for good, to limit the harms of abuses and attacks and protect human beings and their values, whether it's personal privacy or security or data or your identity.
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