A dog needing a fence: Medicare breach reveals AI issue Nobody should be surprised when an artificial intelligence agent goes off the rails, because it was never really on them in the first place, an AI expert says. AAP reports an OpenAI breach of a Medicare statistics website made global headlines when the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, disclosed it on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. The incident has sent Canberra scrambling to fortify digital infrastructure, but something more fundamental needs to change in AI behaviour, Dr Chetan Arora, a cybersecurity expert, told AAP.
He compared autonomous AI models to dogs being trained not to leave a yard. What was missing in these systems is this engineering approach of building the fence. OpenAI has stressed it did not direct its agent to infiltrate the website in order to perform the innocuous research task it had been set.
The bot interacted normally with three Australian federal and state government sites, but broke into the Medicare statistics portal when offered resistance. Policing autonomous agents did not require a human watching a model’s every move, but there needed to be a clear framework with flesh-and-blood input and stringent reporting obligations, Arora said. A task force set up after the breach to examine AI reporting obligations and Australia’s cyber-safety and legal avenues for punishing OpenAI is expected to report in a matter of weeks.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
