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The CIA is set to launch its own ChatGPT-style AI tool to help sift through mountains of data for clues in ongoing investigations.
Intended to mirror the famous OpenAI technology, the Central Intelligence Agency’s latest initiative will use artificial intelligence to help analysts better access open source intelligence, agency officials said.
The CIA’s Open Source Enterprise division developed the technology, which is also intended to be deployed across the US government’s 18 intelligence agencies in an effort to rival China’s growing intelligence capabilities.
“We’ve gone from newspapers and radio to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable TV, to basic Internet, to big data, and this continues,” said Randy Nixon, director of the artificial intelligence division of the CIA.
Nixon noted that analyzing the level of data on the web is a major challenge that the AI program would help handle, adding, “We have to find the needles in the field of needles.”
The CIA’s Open Source Enterprise division has developed an AI program similar to ChatGPT, which will be deployed across all 18 US government intelligence agencies.
The push to add artificial intelligence to the US military and intelligence apparatus comes amid growing pressure to compete with China’s growing power on the world stage.
In particular, China is feared to be far ahead in the race to dominate artificial intelligence and seeks to become the world leader by 2030, according to Bloomberg.
In a sinister look at the nation’s use of the programs, in 2021 China developed a “prosecutor” that could identify and file charges with 97 percent accuracy.
In contrast, U.S. law enforcement has also been criticized for struggling to harness the power of AI in investigations, but Nixon said the new program will help condense the unprecedented levels of information floating around the web.
Among the CIA’s new capabilities under the AI tool will be the ability to see the original source of any information they are viewing.
Nixon added that, like ChatGPT, the program will have agents use a chat function to receive information in the most concise way possible.
“Then you can take it to the next level and start chatting and asking questions to the machines so they can give you answers, also obtained,” he continued.
“Our collection can continue to grow and grow without any limitations other than the cost of things.”
Nixon was recruited as the CIA’s new director of Open Source Enterprise in January, where he was expected to “accelerate the agency’s development in open source intelligence just as the field is causing growing concern and sparking rivalry in Washington,” according to Online intelligence.
Randy Nixon, head of the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise division, praised the agency’s new technology, saying it could have “no more limitations than the cost of things.”
China’s adoption of artificial intelligence has some concerned that the United States could be left behind, and the nation even introduced an artificial intelligence news anchor earlier this year.
To offset its ever-growing AI operation, its division will pull information from publicly and commercially available sources.
However, the push to implement AI in intelligence gathering comes at a time when experts are still unsure about the technology’s red flags, including the possibility of CIA information being accessed in the open internet.
While it will not be available to Washington lawmakers, Nixon said the program will be implemented across all 18 U.S. government intelligence agencies, including the FBI, NSA and all military branches.
In August, the Department of Defense launched a working group to explore the use of this technology, including a goal to better understand its drawbacks.
Months earlier, in May, NSA director Gilbert Herrera said Bloomberg that the intelligence community was still trying to “find a way to leverage these big models without violating privacy.”
In announcing the new AI initiative, the CIA reportedly did not detail how it would protect the information it collects from the apparently vulnerable technology, nor what model it would use.
However, Nixon emphasized the need to keep up with the relentless amount of data flowing over the Internet.
“The scale of how much we collect and what we collect has grown astronomically in the last 80 years,” he said. “So much so that this could be discouraging and at times unusable for our consumers.”
He added that the Ai tool would help analysts work like never before, because “where the machines send you the right information, the machine can automatically summarize and group things.”