I want to say up-front that the misuse of AI almost certainly dwarfs good use of AI. Powerful and shady organizations, individuals, and governments are using it to choose military targets, engage in mass surveillance, put people like us on lists, drown out actual conversation online to advance propaganda, etc.

That’s why you should use AI. Right now, for now, we still have access to frontier models, and there are more of us than there are of them, way more.

I use AI to analyze and synthesize public data in order to catch publicly traded and/or funded companies and their principals committing fraud. The system is very, very complicated and relies on never initially trusting the AI and creating redundant rival layers to validate, as well as copious amounts of code and specialized tools like hooks, skills, rules, etc. For legal reasons I can’t reveal any details about what cases have made it through review and into actual government investigations. Once everything is public record and concluded I plan on releasing more thorough and detailed case-studies. But this isn’t really the place for that or the point of this post, anyway.

The method starts from the fundamental assumption that the AI is wrong. Every factual claim it produces has to trace back to a primary source and if it can’t, the claim doesn’t advance. Nothing the model asserts is taken on its word. One method: a separate model of a different type, working blind, is pointed at each finding with instructions to destroy it, and anything that survives gets checked again by a third. The arithmetic is done by code, not by the AI. On top of that sit automated gates that refuse to let the work move to the next stage until the checks have actually run and passed. It’s slow and it throws away most of what it produces, but what it ends up producing is grounded in reality. Happy to say more in the comments.

I don’t know if there’s a way off of this crazy ride. But for now, at least, we can use AI for us, against Them. Please do, before we can’t.

I asked your mod if I could post this. If y’all disagree with that decision I can understand that this isn’t the point of this sub. I guess I figured maybe I could bring the mountain to Muhammad.