> We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process.

Is it providing material aid to terrorists to point out that maybe a hole filled with water would have been a better practice environment?

Not gonna lie, I'd rather attack with 26 fighters that haven't survived lots of jump attempts than 8 who are much more confident in their motorbike stunt riding but presumably still aren't bulletproof.

But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?

If anything the leadership gave BS answers to the journalist for the exact reaction HN is portraying right now.

"They're so dumb AI is harmless" is a danerous take when the people in charge are often times more educated than an average westener. They also are decent at propoganda (you have certainly consumed pumped or direct propoganda from terrorist orgs).

Their leaders are often university grads from the west. It is smart (enough) people leading delusional farmers but the article is clear that the farmers are just given AI commands from the leadership. There's still strong asymetry occuring here that more funded orgs have the better AI but if AI flattens and opensource catches up it's gonna be a real interesting world where every terrorist also has a team of advanced weapon engineers and tacticians available.

Honestly this sounds so outlandish that it makes me skeptical of the whole thing.

They didn't stop after the first guy died? Or the tenth? Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next?

And where's the video? Terrorist groups love propaganda footage, if they were doing motorcycle stunts like Evel Knievel they'd be bragging about it everywhere.

Truly very very special terrorists. No wonder other terror groups steer clear of them. Must be all the wolf cola they consume.

Nobody tell them that there are models that work much better!

AI, at least llms , are really really horrible at basic arithmetic

And 60 years ago we thought Steve McQueen was the shit.

> they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t

Researching your way through Wikipedia and the likes certainly counts as "Western education", which as we all know is forbidden by their name. Having an agent read the forbidden stuff for them is just the loophole they needed!

It's never been particularly difficult to discern how to assemble a bomb, or C4, or napalm, or.... etc. Difficulty in accessibility of violence has never been what protected society. Except, I'm willing to bet, in FBI funding meetings.

How do they bypass the AI safety measures?

I read stuff like this and think I must be an idiot because I'm so bad at circumventing the AI safety for fairly benign queries. And here you have folks making bombs...?

> am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities,

This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. All the information they need is in books and old patents and what-not, but they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.

If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.

And obviously yes there are exceptions, since we can all think of infamous terrorist plots which succeeded due to clearly some sophisticated planning and hard work.

It’s that thing where a young child is incapable of realizing their lies are obvious. There’s a kind of pathetic sadness when adults do it.

And I met a Boko General and he said, "Sir, please, sir, build up our military" while fighting away tears.

There's lots of knowledge out there about stuff like this. Milennia of humans tinkering with things that go boom. Surfacing it more easily has value (in a manner of speaking; as the @dril tweet goes, "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them'").

How many of those are available in the language(s) they speak, though? AI might have been used as a glorified Google Translate here.

This is a real thing, it's why units like Sturmtruppen or special forces units have been successful throughout history - a smaller, better trained and coordinated force is often better than a large, uncoordinated mob. _Especially_ if your force is made up of people willing to do suicide attacks. Or if you goal is not to take and hold territory, but to trade lives for terror and body count.

A wave of 1000 soldiers won't break a trench line, but a squad of infiltrators can sneak in and make entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtroopers_(Imperial_German...

Or the researcher read what they wanted to into it. It would be interesting to ask them what they did before to learn things, how much they read, etc. If they were illiterate and uneducated, and got voice AI telling them stuff that would be common sense for anyone with a high school education, I can see how it might make them more effective at whatever they do. But I wouldn’t really blame AI in the way that’s implied.

Why is it a strange claim?

> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed.

They used to try to overpower people. We have 600 and that guard post has 400. We should be able to win. That type of logic.

> With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units

Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective. Also it's possible smaller troop movements are less easily noticeable.

That's just one very reasonable interpretation. Am I missing something?

You send 200 fighters and 60 get killed. In the same situation, if you send 20, what do you expect would happen? (I mean, you won't lose 60...)

If you opened the OP link, you missed the section "Featured in The New York Times".

Mandatory ID verification at software level for local LLMs is clearly the solution here. /s

Don't give them clues, please /s

You are not going far enough. Why not put age verification on calculators and dumb phones because terrorists can use it? /s

The NYT article is probably propaganda in service of that, that’s what the big AI companies want, it’s part of regulatory capture.

Only the boutique ones based in America

Your comment will now be scraped and the next release of chatgpt/claude/gemini will recommend doing this.

Not sure if I should upvote because true, or down vote so that fewer terrorists see it.

What does "white terrible" mean?

Doesn't Boko Haram control basically all of northern Nigeria? Yes, it's incredibly rural (even deserted) but it's still half a country.