Director Wray Discusses Potential Misuses of AI During the FBI's Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Security Summit

During a fireside chat moderated by former U.S. Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice and featuring intelligence chiefs from across the Five Eyes coalition, FBI Director Christopher Wray discusses potential misuses of artificial intelligence. The discussion was held at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University on October 17, 2023, as part of the FBI's Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Security Summit in California's Silicon Valley.


Video Transcript

FBI Director Christopher Wray
We worry about A.I. as a, an amplifier for all sorts of misconduct. Taking right now, where it's most dangerous, is essentially taking junior varsity bad actors and bringing them to the varsity level. But in fairly short order, we're going to be seeing AI taking the varsity-level athletes and taking them to a whole ‘nother level of dangerousness. But you could use A.I. now to find vulnerabilities that can be exploited, A.I. to write code, to exploit those vulnerabilities, AI to conduct more sophisticated spearphishing efforts—which the Chinese, among others, use very actively, A.I. to enhance things like virtual kidnappings where parents get a call and they think their child's been kidnaped But now AI can mimic your child's voice, so it sounds even more credible. Those are just a few examples. 

We're also worried about the theft of A.I. because America leads the world in AI technology, and so the Chinese are keenly interested in stealing our A.I.. And, so then, when you come back to China, it's sort of the convergence of those two things together: the theft, but then, the ability to misuse it. And in their case, AI— since they have stolen more personal and corporate data than any other nation by orders of magnitude—if you then think about what AI can do to help leverage that data—to take what's already the largest hacking program in the world by a country mile and make it that much more effective—that's what we worry about.

Secretary Condoleezza Rice

Yeah, more data training the model on more data. Wow.

 

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