#toxins

#toxins

It Took AI Less Than 6 Hours to Invent 40,000 Potentially Lethal ToxinsThis feels like the start of the real-life adaptation of Resident Evil, to be honest. I hope it doesn’t happen, though!An AI created by scientists at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals Inc. was put into a “bad actor mode” to see how easily it could be abused as a biological weapon. It certainly did its part well, developing and inventing 40,000 potentially lethal molecules in less than six hours. The machine’s original purpose was to search for helpful drugs, following the company’s goal of finding drug treatments for rare diseases. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.According to Fabio Urbina, a senior scientist at the company and the lead author of the study, they used datasets of molecules that have been tested for their toxicity to train the AI. The AI  learned how to make toxins from the information it collected from those datasets. The researchers saw the model producing molecules similar to chemical warfare agents in just a short period of time. Urbina shared to The Verge that the most concerning thing that they learned from this study was how easy it was for artificial intelligence to create just from the information available. “If you have somebody who knows how to code in Python and has some machine learning capabilities, then in probably a good weekend of work, they could build something like this generative model driven by toxic datasets. So that was the thing that got us really thinking about putting this paper out there; it was such a low barrier of entry for this type of misuse.” Urbina stated. Image credit: Urbina, et.al #toxins #artificialintelligence #ai #science #CollaborationsPharmaceuticals