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They did so by jailbreaking it, effectively tricking it to bypass its guardrails. They broke down their attacks into small, seemingly innocent tasks that Claude would execute without being provided the full context of their malicious purpose.

This raises an important question: if AI models can be misused for cyberattacks at this scale, why continue to develop and release them? The answer is that the very abilities that allow Claude to be used in these attacks also make it crucial for cyber defense.

By contrast, you or I having “by right” access to the party label next to our name on an American primary ballot is like saying a Blackberry has a right to be in the iPhone primary election, And if it wins, Blackberries are the standard-bearer for iPhones in the November election.

This contrasts completely with our single member district system, where multiparty formation is inhibited because of Duverger’s Law, which notes that the incentive structure of single member districts’ electoral systems largely prevents party formation above two.

The liberal advances that the other democracies made since the end of World War II—the welfare state, equitable healthcare, infrastructure, etc.—have been stymied by our unique structures of minority rule that have shaped the GOP into an anti-system, anti-progress party in a way that other countries’ center right parties, like the UK conservatives and the German CDP-CSU, are not.

Magic means that the universe is behaving not as a giant machine but as something that is aware of you as a person who is different from other people, and that people are different from things.

You can write fiction that is consistent with the specific body of facts we have, or you can write fiction that reflects the scientific worldview, even if it is not consistent with that body of facts.

Language has to support every type of communication that humans engage in, from debates between politicians to pillow talk between lovers.

But predicting the most likely next word is different from having correct information about the world, which is why LLMs are not a reliable way to get the answers to questions, and I don’t think there is good evidence to suggest that they will become reliable.

LLMs are not engaged in reasoning any more than a telephone switchboard was, but their ability to simulate conversation makes it far easier to imagine that they are.

Many people would have you believe that the process of making art and the end result can be easily separated, but I don’t believe they can be.

LLMs are not going to develop subjective experience no matter how big they get. It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words “Baby don’t hurt me” on them.

I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich.

For such an atmosphere to exist, we would have to forget everything that makes us who we are. We would have to believe, despite so much evidence to the contrary, that the world is a fair and just place. And we would have to have nothing at stake.

Civility is a cage that we’re supposed to lock ourselves into and then we are expected to be grateful for our incarceration.

Calling for civility is about exerting power. It is a way of reminding the powerless that they exist at the will of those in power and should act accordingly. It is a demand for control.

invoking the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam: The world will always be broken, she sings. Repair it anyway

The individual user relies on the information flowing through their phone to make their choices, and their decisions then feed back into the overall system.

What is happening here is more than an abstract flow of information. It is more than a means of surveillance. It is more than a price mechanism. Rather, it’s as if the air traffic control and insurance commission functions of the IBM 650 have been fused, shrunk, and wholly generalised. This is the real computing revolution. Much of what we do is immediately authenticated as we do it, stored as data, classified or scored on some sort of scale, and deployed in real time to modulate some outcome of interest – usually, the behaviour of a person, or a machine, or an organisation.

The tyranny may come, instead, from digital platforms that enhance individualism and interpersonal competition to such a degree that our ability to form meaningful social bonds and to act together has been fundamentally altered.

The sociologist Angèle Christin has described savage online battles between vegan influencers who push the envelope of vegan purity or expose their rivals as secret meat-eaters.

What began as a celebration of individual uniqueness that avidly encouraged the production of digital evidence is evolving into an elaborate system of verification that will treat any trace as a potentially suspect record.

The advent of generative AI possibly worsens the epistemic challenge: when everything must be authenticated, but fakes get more sophisticated all the time, how do we know anything?

For all its problems, if you asked any scholar whether they would go back to a fully pre-digital, pre-networked world of knowledge-sharing, academic communication and data availability, the answer would overwhelmingly be ‘absolutely not’.

While the sense of searching online as a form of active, critical thinking has persisted, for some, finding good information can be difficult.

Seeking some meaningful truth, people search for significant clues scattered across the internet, using commercial algorithms and recommender systems to connect the disparate pieces of information they venture upon into some sort of coherent worldview.

Because the firms training them desperately need to make money, the familiar business logics of personalisation and tiered benefits are likely to reassert themselves, with customised epistemic universes now served up by models catering to publics with particular tastes and different abilities to pay.

The main casualty is the possibility of broad-based, stable political alliances. The more citizens are treated, individually, as objects of market intervention, the more disaggregated politics becomes.

As the deployment of digital technologies continues to generate ever-more stratospheric concentrations of wealth, the masses sink deeper into the void left by the evisceration of social solidarity and the rise of automation.