SocietyAI glossary
Social engineering
The art of manipulating a person rather than hacking a machine: posing as a colleague, a boss or a bank adviser to obtain a transfer or access. AI gives it new tools, such as cloned voices or doctored videos.
In other words
Rather than picking the lock, the burglar rings the bell dressed as a delivery driver, and someone opens the door.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- They ask ChatGPT who to vote for
American voters are preparing their vote with ChatGPT. Six months out from the French presidential election, what that teaches us, and the habits to adopt.
- What difference does changing the name of a thing make?
Washington renames AI "superintelligence". A name is never neutral: it shapes what we see. The original phrase was not neutral either.
- Invisible text in an email is enough to hijack the summary your AI makes of it.
Researchers have shown that invisible text inserted into an email can manipulate the summary produced by an AI assistant. Here's how the mechanism works and how to defend against it.
- Can you delegate your memory?
Entrusting one's memory to a system that retains, summarises and retrieves raises a different question from that of the notebook or the search engine. We examine what memory does and what is lost in delegating it.
- Agents that pay: the legal framework is being built urgently
A payment protocol for agents, normative work on their identity, and a proposed law all converge on the same requirement: being able to prove who authorised an action. We analyse this undertaking.
- Do we have the right to know we're talking to an AI?
Should you always be informed that you're dealing with a machine? We examine the arguments on both sides, the cases where the answer is obvious, and those—far more numerous—where it isn't at all.