‘Poisoned’ data could wreck AIs in wartime, warns Army software acquisition chief
“Any commercial LLM that is out there, that is learning from the internet, is poisoned today,” Jennifer Swanson said, “but our main concern [is] those algorithms that are going to be informing battlefield decisions.”
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
on April 19, 2024 at 9:33 AM
WASHINGTON — Even as the Pentagon makes big bets on big data and artificial intelligence, the Army’s software acquisition chief is raising a new warning that adversaries could “poison” the well of data from which AI drinks, subtly sabotaging algorithms the US will use in future conflicts.
“I don’t think our data is poisoned now,” deputy assistant secretary Jennifer Swanson emphasized Wednesday at a Potomac Officers Club conference, “but when we’re fighting a near-peer adversary, we have to know exactly what those threat vectors are.”
The fundamental problem is that every machine-learning algorithm has to be trained on data — lots and lots of data. The Pentagon is making a tremendous effort to collect, collate, curate, and clean its data so analytic algorithms and infant AIs can make sense of it. In particular, the prep team needs to throw out any erroneous datapoints before the algorithm can learn the wrong thing.
https://breakingdefense.com/2024/04/poisoned-data-could-wreck-ais-in-wartime-warns-army-software-chief/
