Don't expect quick fixes in 'red-teaming' of AI models. Security was an afterthought

abcnews.go.com:

White House officials concerned about AI chatbots' potential for societal harm and the Silicon Valley powerhouses rushing them to market are heavily invested in a three-day competition ending Sunday at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas

BOSTON — White House officials concerned by AI chatbots' potential for societal harm and the Silicon Valley powerhouses rushing them to market are heavily invested in a three-day competition ending Sunday at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas.

Some 2,200 competitors tapped on laptops seeking to expose flaws in eight leading large-language models representative of technology's next big thing. But don't expect quick results from this first-ever independent «red-teaming” of multiple models.

Findings won't be made public until about February. And even then, fixing flaws in these digital constructs — whose inner workings are neither wholly trustworthy nor fully fathomed even by their creators — will take time and millions of dollars.

Current AI models are simply too unwieldy, brittle and malleable, academic and corporate research shows. Security was an afterthought in their training as data scientists amassed breathtakingly complex collections of images and text. They are prone to racial and cultural biases, and easily manipulated.

“It’s tempting to pretend we can sprinkle some magic security dust on these systems after they are built, patch them into submission, or bolt special security apparatus on the side,” said Gary McGraw, a cybsersecurity veteran and co-founder of the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning. DefCon competitors are “more likely to walk away finding new, hard problems,” said Bruce Schneier, a Harvard public-interest technologist. “This is computer