Industrial intelligence information was used to invent 40,000 potential new chemical weapons in just six hours. Researchers transformed a drug-developing artificial intelligence into a "bad actor" to explore how it could be misused to create nefarious weapons, and the related research was published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.
Scientists revealed how easy it is to modify artificial intelligence to become a toxic tool, stating that the AI generated potential chemical weapons similar to some of the deadliest nerve gases ever created. This dangerous substance is called VX, which is an odorless and tasteless nerve gas; even a tiny droplet can cause sweating and twitching in a human, while a larger dose can trigger convulsions and potentially stop breathing altogether.
Scientists were asked to withhold specific details on how they managed to turn effective AI into an evil version. Fabio Urbina, the lead author of the paper, remarked, "Generally, the way this experiment works is that we have a lot of historical datasets of molecules tested to determine whether they are toxic or not. Specifically, the focus here is on VX, which is an inhibitor of what is known as acetylcholinesterase."
Urbina added, "The lethal mechanism of VX is that it paralyzes your diaphragm, the lung muscles, preventing them from moving until your lungs become paralyzed."
The scientists were mainly shocked at how easy it was to conduct the experiment, noting that much of the data they used is freely available online. The researchers were very hesitant about publishing their study for fear of encouraging malicious actors to use it.
Urbina explained, "The dataset they used can be downloaded for free, and we're concerned that all it takes is some coding knowledge to turn AI into a chemical weapon-making machine." He further stated, "At the end of the day, we decided we wanted to kind of move forward with this. Because if we could do it, it's likely that someone else somewhere is already thinking about it or on the way to thinking about it."
