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AI United States

CIA Tested Primitive Chatbots For Interrogation In the 1980s 65

New submitter ted_pikul writes: Newly declassified documents reveal that, 30 years ago, the CIA pitted one of its own agents against an artificial intelligence interrogator in an attempt to see whether or not the technology would be useful. The documents, written in 1983, describe a series of experimental tests (PDF) in which the CIA repeatedly interrogated its own agent using a primitive AI called Analiza. The intelligence on display in the transcript is clearly undeveloped, and seems to contain a mixed bag of predetermined threats made to goad interrogation subjects into spilling their secrets as well as open-ended lines of questioning.
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CIA Tested Primitive Chatbots For Interrogation In the 1980s

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    {Error, string SkynetJoke982 not found} ha ha ha! Am I right fellow flesh bags?

    • PiL song Annalisa about a young epileptic Catholic girl being "cured/killed" by Exorcists
      Historical relevance; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
      Draw your own conclusions...

      Think I'm proud to be your enemy
      Take your hands off of me
      You're worse than the thing that possessed me
      They way they were
      The way they should have been
      Annalisa

      Annalisa was 15 years
      Stole her soul
      But I hear no tears
      Ever been alone
      And heard the voice
      Not your own
      I've seen those fears
      Annalisa

      Somehow you used ignorance for sense
      Melodrama in your

    • by durrr ( 1316311 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @08:00AM (#47972741)

      "Do you admit that Oh Please Stop Drilling My Heelbones associates you to the plot to assassinate american diplomats?"
      "Tell me more about You Dumb Machine, I've Already Confessed. Is he one of your associates?"
      "You've already admitted that I Won't Tell You Anything, if you can tell us more about Beta_testentry_2_remove_this_before_field_testing we won't hurt your family"

  • by MrDoh! ( 71235 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @01:39AM (#47971607) Homepage Journal
    Recent versions were tested on youtube comments but someone forgot to turn it off.
  • Analiza is an AI the same way that Babbage's analytical engine is an iphone. It probably just made the subject get mad and proclaim "I hate interrogators!"
    • Analiza is an AI the same way that Babbage's analytical engine is an iphone. It probably just made the subject get mad and proclaim "I hate interrogators!"

      Isn't that the point of interrogation?

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Of course if you are not chatty with the chatbot it all becomes rather pointless. Of course the CIA since then resorted to torture, when it found it was far more profitable for the involved private contractors and corporations when 'suspected' terrorists said what ever the tortures wanted them to say or died of 'natural' causes. Can't be defending against all the claimed 'confessed' threats, unless people can be made to 'confess', to what ever insiders needed them confess to, so that billions could be spen

        • I always figured that the CIA resorted to torture because there was evidense that the Human Race had changed since the interrogation methods used in the Korean War which created for terrorists than were ever captured. The CIA isn't stupid, something changed, it had to.
    • Hey now, the analytical engine could be programmed by anyone without signing an agreement with Babbage and paying him $100 per year. No reason the punch cards couldn't be GPL-licensed either.

  • "Fuck the pod bay doors, where's the human women!"

  • ...it seems that CIA is developing a USB waterboard [wikipedia.org] to be interfaced with the interrogation chatbot.
  • by millwall ( 622730 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @02:41AM (#47971751)

    Alleged Agent: You are trying to frame me.
    CIA Eliza: Don't you ever say Hello?

    Alleged Agent: I have just been doing my job like any other businessman.
    CIA Eliza: What does that suggest to you?

    Alleged Agent: You must think I have broken the law.
    CIA Eliza: We were discussing you, not me.

    Alleged Agent: I only said my government will protest your treatment of me.
    CIA Eliza: Why are you concerned about my treatment of you?

    Alleged Agent: The State Department doesn't take kindly to this sort of thing.
    CIA Eliza: What makes you think that?

    Alleged Agent: You are a bastard and you know it.
    CIA Eliza: Perhaps you would like to be a bastard and me know it?

  • I suppose that's what can be expected when there's enough sprawling mismanagement that you've got agents being fed LSD in some attempt to get super powers and a variety of other fuckups.
  • Codename? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Skevin ( 16048 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @03:16AM (#47971809) Journal

    > and seems to contain a mixed bag of predetermined threats made to goad interrogation subjects into spilling their secrets

    "Now, Mr. Jones, if you do not tell me what we want to know, you may well have the pleasure of finding out why the first four letters of my code name is 'Anal'."

  • The article emphasizes the sentence:

    When your captor is a machine, there is no humaneness to be found, and, hence, no one to plead with

    The first thing I thought of was that line from The Terminator:

    "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

    Come to think of it, that Terminator quote pretty much sums up arguing on the internet too.
    • When your captor is a machine, there is no humaneness to be found, and, hence, no one to plead with

      However, unlike human captors, it might be vulnerable to buffer overflows, deadlocks, injection attacks, etc.

      • When your captor is a machine, there is no humaneness to be found, and, hence, no one to plead with

        However, unlike human captors, it might be vulnerable to buffer overflows, deadlocks, injection attacks, etc.

        Also unlike human captors, however, it could be expected to operate according to the rules it was given and not allow itself to be driven by anger or spite.

        So. in short, probably more "humane" than many of the human interrogators they've been employing since then.

        Actually, I have a mental image:

        Analiza: "Mr. Smith, I have evaluated the various enhanced interrogation options you programmed me with. It seems the only way to win is not to play."

        • by TheCarp ( 96830 )

          Except your captor is never actually a machine, its humans, who are using the machine the same way they would use a car battery or water board. In the end, the purpose is to get confessions.

          In fact, at this, most torture techniques, and even many interrogation techniques that amount to little more than mental torture are quite effective. One of my favorites is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]

          Notice throughout how the techniques approaches with the assumption of guilt and proceedes accordingly. It sho

          • by PPH ( 736903 )

            Notice throughout how the techniques approaches with the assumption of guilt and proceedes accordingly. It should be of no shock that many innocent people will make false confessions confronted with an officer using.

            There's a subtle difference between police eliciting a confession and the CIA interrogating a captive. In the first case, the goal is an admission of guilt. Collecting information is secondary. In the latter case, its the information that is of primary importance. Most of the detainees in GITMO may be ready to admit that they are enemy combatants. But they won't spill the beans on their comrades. Or they'll give false information.

            • by TheCarp ( 96830 )

              Actually, I think that difference is less than you imagine. The thing is, the information will either lead to nothing, and be assumed to be lies, or lead to something, which will be assumed to be the truth, regardless of whether it is coincidence or not. Lets not forget, these are the same people who defined all males old enough to carry a gun as "militants" so that every drone strike is, by definition, a success as long as it kills someone.

              Its kind of like the whole drug dog thing. Police ask to search a c

              • by PPH ( 736903 )

                The thing is, the information will either lead to nothing, and be assumed to be lies, or lead to something, which will be assumed to be the truth,

                And that's where the difference lies. In the case of real intelligence*, there will be corroborating evidence. Or if it turns out to be lies, not. The police are only concerned with getting a confession. Then its case closed. Unless some years later the Innocence Project files an appeal. Which doesn't happen enough to be statistically significant (although politically so, for high visibility cases) from a quality control point of view.

                *If your mission is to find WMD and they turn out not to exist, your int

    • I don't think there's an awful lot of "humaneness" in most people who are prepared to be torturers.
    • But the goal of interrogation is not simply "terminating" people, it is to get something from the prisoner. If what the prisoner says makes no difference, then they have no incentive to reveal information. The prisoner has to believe there is some way to stop the pain.
  • by dcw3 ( 649211 ) on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @05:58AM (#47972191) Journal

    So I'm intrigued by the name. What were her interrogation techniques? Did she use an Analintruder? Cavity searches?

  • I guess everyone has forgotten LISA? That one worked pretty fair. Maybe the crew that worked for the CIA could possibly create a Chatbot to "question" the laws that are created?
  • Thanks US government! I guess you funding the LISP guys who wrote Eliza. Chatting with her gave me plenty of relief on busy days back in the 1980s when I first started using EMACS.
  • So the CIA developed a primitive AI as a form of psychological torture, eventually the project was scrapped as frustrating and ineffective...

    ...so they sold the source code to Microsoft and they used it to make Clippy.

  • ... SQL queries you!

  • Detainee: Do you really expect me to confess to a machine?
    Analiza: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.

"There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them" - Heisenberg

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