The language models fill out the survey?

Very fascinating. One thing I didn’t quite understand is you have these representatives, but then how is a deliberation achieved? Is it still a human-to-loop or are they actually negotiating like in our example? I didn’t understand how to come from this committee to an actual policy or decision.

Actually, maybe you might be interested. We just had a work on LLM deliberation. Basically, we had a multiple LLMs negotiating a deal. These could basically be these different representatives. For example, we had one from the environmental organization, one was the local housing organization. Then, basically, they go around ...

Ah, yes. The citizen assemblies. So, that’s kind of a virtual version of the citizen assemblies. It gives these representatives, you can…

It’s basically… I think in Germany they come back to these I think committees is not like basic group demography, but they basically get a small set of people together.

I just have prototypical opinions with the representatives of that collective dissent…

What do you mean by]avatar? I mentioned there’s a single instance of an avatar. What is it more like?

It’s a collective opinion, so to say…

You mean for many deliberations, like negotiations?

So, you mentioned there is an AI testing facility and certification. I’m not so much into the, we do some technical methodological certification more for the improving side. I’m less about how to do certification from legal or how to bridge this gap. But also, in my network, there are ...

Interesting. Otherwise, maybe one thing I would like to learn more about is the testing center you mentioned.

I feel like that is the most central element of life.

Yeah.

So that is something we haven’t fully figured out, but we kind of think that might be even more disruptive to the changes of how we store, process and also write code, for example. So, I think we just have started brainstorming in my group a bit, how it would ...

But I think for now, I guess, there is a certain level of accountability of spelling things out, that they are inspectable, but even for measures of robustness or certification, you probably want to have other syntax or other logical forms that are being, as a typical representation, not necessarily ...

So, I think that’s also something we also work with language models in code, with also security vulnerabilities and so on, and making them more reliable. And we always think, where is the point we develop different forms to store the information. As also, again, some of the benefits that ...

I think for code, this is also a question, again, there are some examples where you say, you just say there is an API and all of a sudden, the language model mimics the API. So, it’s kind of this rapid prototyping where you never implement the code, it’s just ...

I think also you say… That’s also a good question, or something we try to wrap our head around is, right now we’re using all the written code or text as information channels, so to say. So, maybe in some domains, maybe there might be also evolution that for some ...

So, maybe there’s society in a few years’ time that can handle the scale of communication, the amount of untrusted information, but maybe not this generation or the next one. So, that’s one of the issues. But how then to mitigate the time between, I think, is a good question.

Yeah, I think something is more going in the right direction. Some things, disruptive events make it unpredictable in a sense. But it’s just a singular point where people continually give up on this. I think it’s also a real risk with the advance of technology. All this synthesis that ...

I’m still trying to imagine it. Interesting.

Yeah, okay. I agree, but I think it’s probably difficult because we have… Digitalization has gone so far and a lot of the speed and the leverage of scale has built on this, so we would need to step back on many of these. Basically, I’m not sure if society ...

But when you say information collapse, would that imply that there’s a point where society becomes alienated from technology and we just go back to smaller circles, personal communication? I’m not sure what that implies. It doesn’t sound very…

Okay. So, there’s more pessimism…

And for an information society, that’s shaping its core, really. So, there are some efforts to more protect authenticity and attribution or have new media formats, and that’s my domain. I see there are some systematic approaches to attribution and data provenance, but I don’t see it implemented in that ...

Yeah. On the government, I’m still not sure if there’s any fault in this, but there’s a substantial risk of information inflation, so a devaluation of information as… There are some very pessimistic predictions that maybe up to 90% of all content will be synthesized, resynthesized.

So, it’s, again, it was a debate if there’s appreciable gain, but overall believing that’s a sustainable solution, that would be indeed a theatre.

I think there are certain areas, again, there’s kind of… I think it’s a whole range of risk in different economies. So, there’s some low-profile things, but maybe people use this for certain attacks, also basically generating videos of people and so on in different contexts, and maybe these have ...

We also had a discussion with the EU Commission because they thought of implementing this, but then they also say there’s a certain cost to it, maintaining an infrastructure that maintains watermarks and needs to be updated all the time. And then the appreciable added value in security was at ...

Exactly, that’s basically… but it’s even more weirder that there’s so much attention given right now to the companies who propose these solutions. Again, we also published on this, but I thought we had a balanced statement that this is something…

I think also with watermarking, we have worked on watermarking for example quite a bit…

And again, I think in Europe there will be a right to know if you talk to a human or a machine or a robot. Technically enforcing this, I’m quite pessimistic. Again, there will be legal ways to enforce it, but to have sustained solutions to detect, I think this ...

And I also very much agree with… I think sometimes I like to call this the shift from static to dynamic or personalized misinformation. But I also am very unclear what kind of the more latent or subtle impact it will have on language or conversation in general. I think ...

Okay. We’re also working in… I think NIST also had this MITRE ATLAS, which is basically a taxonomy of AI threats. So, we’re also in contact with them in designing the threat taxonomy for large language models. So, as we have pioneered some of the work, again, we’re trying to ...

Yeah, I guess it’s one of the voices. It’s good if people have more voices and it will impact the policy making, I guess. I think that’s a good thing. I’m not sure how much we see concerted efforts across different countries, I’m not sure.

We also, with this European network, I’m coordinating… We also put out a strategic research agenda on safe and secure AI. We wrote this in August. It’s not yet published, but we’ll publish it in the next weeks. We also demand more openness and more transparency and also getting more ...

Yeah. And that’s what all the prompt injection, that’s exactly just repeating the same issue. That’s a bit frustrating.

That’s not implemented right now.

I think there’s also so many lessons learned from cybersecurity, and a bit of history is keeping repeating that right now. So really basic principles of cybersecurity that are just violated, I think that’s one argument making that instruction and code is not separate, basically, in the models of trusted ...

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

I think the current red teaming efforts, they were closed. I think they pay money, but they… They already closed.

So, there’s some leverage we can take from the source models to understand vulnerabilities that can mimic white box attacks. But it’s a wide gap, and we hope there’s more transparency and openness.

Not so much. Yeah, there are still technology gaps, but I think there have been some works that have shown that as transfer, that they have attacked open models, and then the attacks have been transfer.

And from our interaction with Microsoft and also OpenAI, they have been kind of very conservative on this side. I think even their security teams haven’t been involved as much in the testing phases. So, we hope that in the future, we just get more open to public penetration testing, ...

Yeah, and also, I think from cyber security, pretty much, although the history shows that if you have open models, it’s better for academia and transparency in testing.

And also in the EU, there’s the efforts to build on language models to, because it kind of mirrors the culture, so preserve culture, preserve the speech. But also, I think, matters of digital sovereignty. I think that we build on top of this, we get very dependent on the ...

Yeah, I’m not sure how much this will help with the capping. I think we see in racing; they have something similar for simulation. They cap the flops they can use. But yeah, then there is the question that really helps, so to say.

Yeah, yeah, that’s a big deal. Yeah, I think it was the Biden administration that yesterday said they signed an executive order to be more transparent, non-discriminatory, privacy-preserving.

There are some populational and national problems, but also the ecosystem that’s probably built on top of the language models is something we’re kind of looking at more closely right now.