Scientists Warn AI Could Be Misused For Design Of Chemical Weapons And Deadly Biology

AI technology can be used to make deadly chemical weapons and bilogy. (photo: dock. Pixabay)

JAKARTA - Scientists have warned that artificial intelligence (AI) can be easily misused to design highly dangerous chemical and biological weapons.

This technology can indeed help in the discovery of antibiotics and drugs to fight Covid-19 infection, but four researchers involved in the discovery of AI-based drugs have found that the technology can be easily manipulated to search for toxic nerve compounds.

The four researchers were asked by the Swiss Federal Institute for Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection to evaluate whether AI can be used by people with specific motives. The results of their research found 40,000 potential toxic compounds within six hours, if manipulated by the wrong search direction.

This finding was published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. Fabio Urbina, the lead author of the article, expressed their concern that AI technology could easily be misused.

They only need to turn the switch and direct the search towards toxicity. Some of the compounds produced by AI were even more toxic than VX, a neural weapon developed by the UK's Defense Science and Technology Lab in the 1950s, which caused death by switching off the nervous system and muscles.

"Our concern is how easy it is for someone with malicious interests to take advantage of this technology. A lot of materials and data used in our research are available for free on the internet, including dataset toxicity," said Fabio Urbina, who is also CEO of Collaboration Pharmaceuticals in North Carolina, United States., as quoted by the Daily Mail.

These scientists emphasize that the use of AI technology must be closely monitored and there needs to be a clear set-up on its use. These findings suggest that there is a need to define restrictions on the use of AI for specific purposes, and to ensure that the technology is not misused for bad purposes.