> A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
Ive seen people going through Plaud.AI conversation to find "on day X person Y said Z to person W", just to get some amunition against them.
Or at the border where it is already routine to ask for social media accounts (especially foreign nationals) you might someday five the border agent your login.
It’s like thinking about edge cases in programming…
Most people are totally not like that. And it does force you into some difficult choices.
> An unattended bag found in the company’s offices contained Alfozan’s wallet and identification, as well as a recording device
It’s almost like he wanted to be caught…
I wonder what the IQ of someone needs to be to think that covering it up with tp makes it less suspicious instead of more. And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
Remember, this is only the company responsible for potentially building and aligning AGI. No need to be setting high expectations toward their sandboxing or hiring capabilities.
What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.
Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
Not just your AI.
You could have stopped the sentence at "uncle Sam can see anything" and these days it's pretty much true. They will use all of it against you if they can. Unless you truly want to live off the grid, if the state takes a sufficient interest in you, expect everything you do to be seen.
Uncle Sam tried to get MLK to kill himself by sending him letters alleging knowledge of an affair [1]. Getting some idiot's wife's chatgpt logs represents a fairly routine law enforcement action these days, and as such is really rather unremarkable. The State is always something of a terror. Really under most (if not all) conceptions, it necessarily has to be. The monopoly of force is a comfort until the Leviathan knocks on your door.
I wonder if the BaaS-providers monitor the accounts of decision makers. They could profit if they figure out what e.g. a central banker is going to decide. Or... if they're the ones deciding for him.
Hah, you can even streamline that by having an AI agent that autonomously makes decisions based on insider info...
>how does someone this dumb get hired
It's AI inbreeding all the way down.
We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
He was a Saudi national, so that is a possibility
There’s plenty of better people out there who just aren’t interested in that sort of stuff.
The justice.gov article doesn't specifically say it was an OpenAI account, but I think, based on the fact that they have logs including MAC address of the device, that we could probably assume that. The alternative is that other chatbot account providers are collaborating.
Regardless, doing a string search on a MAC address for a device you find inside your property doesn't strike me as an abuse of the data that is also your property.
>submitted prompts... including its custom header and unique MAC
They can confiscate your computers, too.
This person, of all people, would know this. He really thought he’d never get caught.
Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications.
Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation?
Yes, they did. The people who felt it was totally normal to add that would no doubt be surprised how desperate and cheap it makes them look.
Good time to start a company that builds giant Faraday cages over data centers.
The alignment people would like you worry about the model exfiltrating itself, too.
Free cooling, safe from missile attack, and safe from some types of electronic spying.
Still a significantly less dumb idea than space data centers.
https://www.propublica.org/article/saudi-fugitives-accused-o...
Certainly they would be transparent and very ethical with something like that
“OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 3…On Oct. 5, the complaint says, Alfozan entered the conference room and appeared to look behind the television.”
The image was captured after the bug was found.
But no the boring answer is that after they found the device they left it in place and planted the camera to see who came looking for it.
Back of a TV is a decent hiding place. Wonder how they found it -was it actively transmitting?
Unless you mean, it happened to be actively transmitting during a(n investigative) sweep.
Still, raises some fun concepts. The sort of things where in this current level of technology you'd almost need to supercool a room for a sweep, blast various RF/sound/etc and look for anything that even remotely warms up, to detect (1) whether something detected something worth recording for later as well as (2) something that might be on the right wavelength/etc to trigger a send.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
I was making a joke, but it does look like they got their components from Seeed Studio based on photos.
https://assets.sfstandard.com/image/994911177489/image_k101c...
It looks like it’s the (SeeedStudio XIAO ESP32S3 Sense w/ WiFi, BLE, OV2640, Mic) https://ca.robotshop.com/products/seeedstudio-xiao-esp32s3-s...
Which is just an esp32s3 based device. I assume the word “sophisticated” in openAI report is just copy paste from device description.
Sounds like we know where their priorities lie, anyway.
...uh what
> “For us it is a matter of national security,” U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement. [...]
> The case is being prosecuted by the National Security, Cyber & Special Prosecutions Section of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California.
(But that was after OpenAI "referred the matter to the FBI")
There's presumably a strong argument for making this stuff known internally, since you want other employees to a) be on the lookout for it and b) get scared into NOT doing it themselves because someone else got caught.
If you tell your employees, the outside world is going to hear about it too.
(Or maybe you spend two hours on the phone to them talking about all kinds of stuff while also scribbling a note to your PA saying “EMPLOYEE JOE BUG STORY LEAKED TO VALLEYWAG PUT OUT COUNTER PR GET AGEAD OF STORY” and hoping they get a tweet out before the valleywag gumshoe gets off the phone.)
(Or maybe you keep a notion.so page pre-filled with all your secrets and each one has a burn button next to it, ready for you to tap when ValleyWag call up for a comment on their upcoming exposé on PR/Disasters/20206090500039.md)
This isn’t uncommon, but it’s rare this info is shared in such detail publicly..possibly to make an example.
Concealing a recording device in a conference room in toilet paper is a bit strange. Do executives meet in the toilets to discuss strategic moves?
Either way, there goes the false flag and the reason for companies to stop hiring humans over this espionage.