No data poisoning internal link—military AI won’t use the same commercial dataset

Commercial chatbots from 2016’s Microsoft Tay to 2023’s ChatGPT are notorious for sucking up misinformation and racism along with all the other internet content they consume. But what’s worse, Swanson argued, is that the military’s own training data might be deliberately targeted by an adversary – a technique known as “data poisoning.”

“Any commercial LLM [Large Language Model] that is out, there that is learning from the internet, is poisoned today,” Swanson said bluntly. “[But] I am honestly more concerned about what you call, you know, the ‘regular’ AI, because those are the algorithms that are going to really be used by our soldiers to make decisions in the battlefield.”

Making better chatbots isn’t the big problem for the Pentagon, she argued. “I think [generative AI] is fixable,” she said. “It really is all about the data.” Instead of training an LLM on the open internet, as OpenAI et al have done, the military would train it on a trusted, verified military dataset inside a secure, firewalled environment. Specifically, she recommended a system at DoD Impact Level 5 or 6, suitable for sensitive (5) or classified (6) data.