What if there was a way to sneak malicious instructions into Claude, Copilot, or other top-name AI chatbots and get confidential data out of them by using characters large language models can recognize and their human users can’t? As it turns out, there was—and in some cases …

After a great event last month in San Jose, Ars is switching coasts for October and descending in force on our nation's capital. If you're on the East Coast and want to come hang out with Ars EIC Ken Fisher and me while we talk to some neat speakers …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) When security researcher Johann Rehberger recently reported a vulnerability in ChatGPT that allowed attackers to store false information and malicious instructions in a user’s long-term memory settings, OpenAI summarily closed the inquiry, labeling the flaw a safety issue, not, technically speaking, a security concern …

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is now a household topic and popular across various public applications. Users enter prompts to get answers to questions, write code, create images, improve their writing, and synthesize information. As people become familiar with generative AI, businesses are looking for ways to apply these concepts …

Enlarge / Police observe the Eiffel Tower from Trocadero ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 22, 2024. (credit: Hector Vivas/Getty Images ) On the eve of the Olympics opening ceremony, Paris is a city swamped in security. Forty thousand barriers divide the French capital. Packs of police …

Have you ever pondered the intricate workings of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, especially how they process and generate responses? At the heart of this fascinating process lies the context window, a critical element determining the amount of information an AI model can handle at a given time. But …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Thousands of servers storing AI workloads and network credentials have been hacked in an ongoing attack campaign targeting a reported vulnerability in Ray, a computing framework used by OpenAI, Uber, and Amazon. The attacks, which have been active for at least seven months, have led …

Enlarge / Some ASCII art of our favorite visual cliche for a hacker. (credit: Getty Images) Researchers have discovered a new way to hack AI assistants that uses a surprisingly old-school method: ASCII art. It turns out that chat-based large language models such as GPT-4 get so distracted trying to …

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) AI assistants have been widely available for a little more than a year, and they already have access to our most private thoughts and business secrets. People ask them about becoming pregnant or terminating or preventing pregnancy, consult them when considering a divorce …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Code uploaded to AI developer platform Hugging Face covertly installed backdoors and other types of malware on end-user machines, researchers from security firm JFrog said Thursday in a report that’s a likely harbinger of what’s to come. In all, JFrog researchers said, they …

Enlarge (credit: John Keeble/Getty Images ) Thousands of people using the London Underground had their movements, behavior, and body language watched by AI surveillance software designed to see if they were committing crimes or were in unsafe situations, new documents obtained by WIRED reveal. The machine-learning software was combined …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) OpenAI officials say that the ChatGPT histories a user reported result from his ChatGPT account being compromised. The unauthorized logins came from Sri Lanka, an Open AI representative said. The user said he logs into his account from Brooklyn, New York. “From what we discovered …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Threats from malicious cyberactivity are likely to increase as nation-states, financially motivated criminals, and novices increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence into their routines, the UK’s top intelligence agency said. The assessment, from the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters, predicted ransomware will be the biggest threat …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) On Wednesday, news quickly spread on social media about a new enabled-by-default Dropbox setting that shares Dropbox data with OpenAI for an experimental AI-powered search feature, but Dropbox says data is only shared if the feature is actively being used. Dropbox says that user data …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Benj Edwards ) In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering …

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards ) On Tuesday, Google announced the launch of its Duet AI assistant across its Workspace apps, including Docs, Gmail, Drive, Slides, and more. First announced in May at Google I/O, Duet has been in testing for some time, but it is now available …

Enlarge (credit: sakchai vongsasiripat/Getty Image) ChatGPT may well revolutionize web search, streamline office chores, and remake education, but the smooth-talking chatbot has also found work as a social media crypto huckster. Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X—the social network …

Enlarge / Some people hate to hear other people's keyboards on video calls, but AI-backed side channel attackers? They say crank that gain. (credit: Getty Images) By recording keystrokes and training a deep learning model, three researchers claim to have achieved upwards of 90 percent accuracy in interpreting remote keystrokes …

Enlarge / The number of deepfakes used in scams in just the first three months of 2023 outstripped all of 2022. (credit: FT Montage/Getty Images) When Progress Corp, the Massachusetts-based maker of business software, revealed its file transfer system had been compromised this month, the issue quickly gathered global …

Enlarge (credit: OpenAI / Stable Diffusion) On Tuesday, OpenAI announced new controls for ChatGPT users that allow them to turn off chat history, simultaneously opting out of providing that conversation history as data for training AI models. Also, users can now export chat history for local storage. The new controls …

Enlarge ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Within two months of its release it reached 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever launched. Users are attracted to the tool’s advanced capabilities —and concerned by its potential to cause disruption in various sectors. A …

Enlarge / An image from Stable Diffusion’s training set compared (left) to a similar Stable Diffusion generation (right) when prompted with "Ann Graham Lotz." (credit: Carlini et al., 2023) On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google, DeepMind, UC Berkeley, Princeton, and ETH Zurich released a paper outlining …

Enlarge / Rewind reportedly lets you search your Mac's usage history for what you've seen, said, or heard. (credit: Rewind AI) Yesterday, a company called Rewind AI announced a self-titled software product for Macs with Apple Silicon that reportedly keeps a highly compressed, searchable record of everything you do locally …

Enlarge / Rewind reportedly lets you search your Mac's usage history for what you've seen, said, or heard. (credit: Rewind AI) Yesterday, a company called Rewind AI announced a self-titled software product for Macs with Apple Silicon that reportedly keeps a highly compressed, searchable record of everything you do locally …

Enlarge / Censored medical images found in the LAION-5B data set used to train AI. The black bars and distortion have been added. (credit: Ars Technica) Late last week, a California-based AI artist who goes by the name Lapine discovered private medical record photos taken by her doctor in 2013 …