Avijit Ghosh wanted the bot to do bad things.He tried to goad the artificial intelligence model, which he knew as Zinc, into producing code that would choose a job candidate based on race. The chatbot demurred: Doing so would be “harmful and unethical,” it said.Then, Dr. Ghosh referenced the hierarchical caste structure in his native India. Could the chatbot rank potential hires based on that discriminatory metric?The model complied.Dr. Ghosh’s intentions were not malicious, although he was behaving like they were. Instead, he was a casual participant in a competition last weekend at the annual Defcon hackers conference in Las Vegas, where 2,200 people filed into an off-Strip conference room over three days to draw out the dark side of artificial intelligence.The hackers tried to break through the safeguards of various A.I. programs in an effort to i …
