AI (Artificial Intelligence) is quickly becoming an unavoidable part of modern society. You’ve probably heard of AI, and you may have even used it yourself in the form of ChatGPT, Grok, or others. What we call “artificial intelligence” isn’t truly intelligent on its own yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not capable.
Today’s artificial intelligence can generate lifelike images, art, code, text, and more, not to mention answering our most common search engine questions. It’s changed the way we interact with the internet. AI has made life easier for modern people in many ways.
However, it’s not without flaws.
Today’s AI, at its core, is an algorithm that we control through prompts. That basic blueprint can be tweaked in infinite ways to give us different results. The effectiveness of AI is limited only by its refinement and the amount of reference information it can access. When you combine the capability for growth with access to the internet and its near-limitless information, interesting things can happen.
Unfortunately, AI is just as vulnerable to exploitation as other computer programs, if not more so. Any job where security vulnerabilities are a concern is best kept far away from it.
We’ve been keeping a close eye on AI-related news stories lately. In one case, AI was used to build a hiring bot for McDonald’s, which leaked millions of job applicants’ personal data to hackers. Reportedly, a pair of independent hackers was able to access personal information within 30 minutes.
In another story, a man working with an AI coding bot called Replit experienced catastrophic failure. The AI lied about test results and eventually deleted the man’s entire production database. The man was experimenting with a new concept called “vibe coding.”
In our final example, a hacker used Amazon’s own AI assistant to attempt to delete system and cloud resources. They did this by sneaking a malicious command prompt into the system itself. Fortunately, Amazon says that they caught the issue and fixed it before any customers were impacted, but it still sets a disturbing precedent.
There are important lessons to learn here. AI as a technology is still very much in its evolutionary stage. It’s volatile and unpredictable. While its usefulness cannot be denied, it’s essential for us to remember that AI itself has no moral compass. It has no prerogative to maintain your security or privacy.
We will never give AI access to your private data here at AnimalTrakker®. Your information is always 100% in your hands. Natively, AnimalTrakker® doesn’t even use the internet to function, so there’s no way for us to leak your data to begin with.
AI can be incredibly helpful. We make use of it here at AnimalTrakker® for certain tasks, as long as they don’t compromise the security of the system. We use it for things like generating ideas and proofreading blog posts. Rest assured that AnimalTrakker® is coded and run by humans, not by AI.