> We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used
AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what
motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it
gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept
asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and
fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do
it. The next time we attacked, we could jump.
Now listen, I'm not saying we need to give these guys more AI, but it clearly isn't yielding bad outcomes for us here.
"You're absolutely correct! For it to be a good practice ground you need to fill the trenches with broken glass and light the whole thing on fire"
I assume you're asking in jest, but having experience in the matter:
Any information you give to someone/group, where you know or have good reason to believe it will be used for terrorism purposes (including training), does put you liable for providing material aid to terrorists.
US Congressman Scott Perry said that USA has financed Boko Haram and other similar groups (remember how Pentagon and CIA independently backed different terrorist groups in Syria, that even fought each other?)
Not gonna lie, I'd rather attack with 26 fighters that haven't survived lots of jump attempts than 8 who are much more confident in their motorbike stunt riding but presumably still aren't bulletproof.
But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
This is a scene in Catch22 IIRC where they decide to stop training the soldiers who need to parachute behind enemy lines because the fatality rate of training was so high that mathematically it made more sense to send in untrained soldiers.
This also reminds me of a offhanded remark in a SsethTzeentach review where he criticizes the Titanic passengers for not having the decency to be ballast and plug the hole with their own bodies
If anything the leadership gave BS answers to the journalist for the exact reaction HN is portraying right now.
"They're so dumb AI is harmless" is a danerous take when the people in charge are often times more educated than an average westener. They also are decent at propoganda (you have certainly consumed pumped or direct propoganda from terrorist orgs).
Their leaders are often university grads from the west. It is smart (enough) people leading delusional farmers but the article is clear that the farmers are just given AI commands from the leadership. There's still strong asymetry occuring here that more funded orgs have the better AI but if AI flattens and opensource catches up it's gonna be a real interesting world where every terrorist also has a team of advanced weapon engineers and tacticians available.
Honestly this sounds so outlandish that it makes me skeptical of the whole thing.
They didn't stop after the first guy died? Or the tenth? Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next?
And where's the video? Terrorist groups love propaganda footage, if they were doing motorcycle stunts like Evel Knievel they'd be bragging about it everywhere.
If they were wary of dying, they wouldn't be in the business of terrorism in the first place. Also, they almost certainly believe in a better afterlife. Reminds of the old animated short: Saga of Bjorn[1].
Yeah this didn't happen. If someone is cracy enough to practice with holes filled with glass on fire why trust them at all about being cracy in the first place?
Erm, if you have 18 guys to spend on training, you also have some empty bottles or access to a place where there are more empty bottles.
Whether crazy people are actually crazy enough to literally do what a LLM gave them as a action sequence from movie inspiration - I have no idea. But I doubt it here.
But on a much more serious note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is terrible. I'd have called it unforgivable, but LLMs are a tough beast to tame in the best of situations... and I'm not really sure if chatgpt ever deserved to be forgived.
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
I feel like I'm missing something though. You can open LM Studio right now and download any model with "heretic" or "uncensored" in the name and it will happily do anything you want with no restrictions whatsoever. What's the point of trying to jailbreak ChatGPT? Is it that much better if all you want is just some instructions to make bombs or whatever? (admittedly - I have no idea if these instructions are actually worth anything, but the models will not object to any question)
You type in the question or use your voice and it [AI] gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?’ and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot! We used it a lot.
I’m pretty skeptical reading this bit. I’ve seen uncensored or jailbroken LLM replies to these kind of questions, they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t, and are hard to provoke if you’re not using an uncensored model.
I have no doubt terrorists are aided by LLMs in a general sense, but am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, and would want to see real evidence, not an interview snippet.
It's never been particularly difficult to discern how to assemble a bomb, or C4, or napalm, or.... etc. Difficulty in accessibility of violence has never been what protected society. Except, I'm willing to bet, in FBI funding meetings.
Has it become harder to find that information without setting off the fed’s alarm bells?
Was fascinated to learn the PRISM news reduced traffic to privacy-relevant Wikipedia articles, a chilling effect in that case, but indicates tech-savvy folks worry about doing anything on clearnet.
…then again since they’re using CLOUD models, guess my comment doesn’t make much sense…
99.99% of the people consuming that content are law abiding (relatively), "normal" citizens, including probably half of 13 year old boys. I'm sure the feds have access to the "list", but it is virtually useless until after the fact when they can tell the jury "and you see here, they looked it up!"
> they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t
Researching your way through Wikipedia and the likes certainly counts as "Western education", which as we all know is forbidden by their name. Having an agent read the forbidden stuff for them is just the loophole they needed!
I read stuff like this and think I must be an idiot because I'm so bad at circumventing the AI safety for fairly benign queries. And here you have folks making bombs...?
This is covered in the full PDF; they have many accounts they spread the queries over and structure them like they're asking for help writing a movie script.
Just for reference, that hasn’t worked for years (the interviews say 2024-25 I think, that kind of attack was patched very early in all the mainstream models) and when it did, you would get bullet point lists GPT 3.5 Turbo style
- first research methods for building effective explosives
- next, assemble the necessary materials to make the bomb
Making explosives is generally fully legal in the US, so IDK if there would even be safeguards for US hosted AI, since there's no real legal issue with doing it. Basically no federal regulations for non-commercial production so long as it isn't stored or moved anywhere, you can literally buy tannerite off the shelf in a sporting good store, "synthesize" it by mixing it and then blow up a huge bomb legally, no license required. YouTube is plastered with people inside the USA making TNT and other materials and then blowing them up.
I can believe some would, but some probably wouldn't care. My local ranch store certainly will happily sell anyone tannerite without even a background check or any sort of scrutiny, you can cash and carry it. Walmart won't but the point being as long as it's legal there will be a "ranch store" that carries it.
>The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs
I mean even YouTube allows bomb making videos and they won't even usually allow videos of people making guns. It's just not very regulated in the US enough to make most companies care. Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information, even after the feds subpoenaed Alphabet for Ashley Dugan's Youtube information they still kept his TNT and other explosives synthesis up.
Of course, if you'll allow me to goomba fallacy for a moment, we're supposed to suspend the common HN wisdom here that companies will do anything for a profit / not care unless it costs them something, and also believe that big tech is going to go out of their way to censor the public domain patents they're already hosting on their servers.
AI safety is really brand safety. They don't want to see any more headlines like "You won't believe what OpenAI's chatbot told me!", which was all the rage early on.
> am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities,
This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. All the information they need is in books and old patents and what-not, but they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
And obviously yes there are exceptions, since we can all think of infamous terrorist plots which succeeded due to clearly some sophisticated planning and hard work.
> they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
This is demonstrably false.
ISIL’s explosives training material in particular is produced with great professionalism and is of extremely high quality.
Al Qaeda’s was a bit more hit an miss, some of it was mostly ideological propaganda and some of it was outstanding but it was otherwise well structured with clear learning outcomes and assessment activities.
Most of this material was produced well before AI was a thing.
>If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
In my head I was running through a whole lot groups to replace "terrorists" with in that sentence...
> This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots.
What even is a terrorist?
If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.
> "one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter"
yes, but only to weak-minded cultural relativists.
I don't mind stating a definition explicitly. If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
Note: The only real complexity in the definition is that during war, embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes, and when it does, it's the ones choosing to do that, war criminals by definition, who bear the responsibility for those innocent deaths when those locations then become legitimate military targets.
I'll omit giving examples to avoid triggering those who like to "bothsides" some of the more well-known terrorist groups lately.
> If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
That's a great example of selection bias: if they were intelligent enough to be capable of causing harm at that scale, they would have immediately realized the new guy suggesting targets and offering to buy them explosives was an FBI agent.
Boko Haram is not a mentally disabled person tricked by the FBI they are real terrorists who attack schools to stop children from learning. They're the epitome of stupid and backwards.
> If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that...
There are a lot of very smart people joining cults, including people who just wanted to study them and were fully aware that what they believed in was nonsense. Terrorist groups are cults.
Just because you consider yourself smart because you have a PhD, high IQ, built a successful company or practice some intellectual activity and are good at it doesn't mean you are immune to the manipulation tactics used by cults. Once sufficiently brainwashed, your judgment will get clouded, but it doesn't mean you will lose your technical skills, which you will put to the service of the cult.
Think about Nazi Germany. Germans weren't idiots, the simple fact that most of the world had to turn against them to defeat them is proof enough. But they still managed to get manipulated into committing the worst crimes.
The reason it worked is not stupidity, it is misery. They were at their lowest following WW1, and Hitler promised them better. Same idea for terrorist groups and other cults, people who are experiencing hardships are the easiest to indoctrinate, and there is no shortage of such people in Nigeria.
There's lots of knowledge out there about stuff like this. Milennia of humans tinkering with things that go boom. Surfacing it more easily has value (in a manner of speaking; as the @dril tweet goes, "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them'").
I agree with other commenters that the claims made in the report are strange.
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed. With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units.
The other quotes and use cases could make sense in terms of using AI jailbreaks to find information more easily, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the clueless researcher just get trolled?
This is a real thing, it's why units like Sturmtruppen or special forces units have been successful throughout history - a smaller, better trained and coordinated force is often better than a large, uncoordinated mob. _Especially_ if your force is made up of people willing to do suicide attacks. Or if you goal is not to take and hold territory, but to trade lives for terror and body count.
I don't think that's the point of suspicion. Smaller vs larger group tactics have been available in pretty much any place you look. It's in movies. It's in games. It's in books. Like actual military strategy books studied by military students. This has been available for much longer than LLMs.
The books exist, but those books are read by few outside military leadership.
The good ones come from leaders who have been there, and they skip over the basics. Being able to talk to a chatbot that can get people past the classic military mistakes could make a force far more effective. Maybe. It's not going to create a Giap or a Rommel, but it might keep a force from repeating classic military mistakes.
There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.
A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.
The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.
I guess they aren't reading Art of War either. Knowing one's enemy blah blah. People unwilling to learn from others are doomed to repeat other's failures. In some situations, there's a perverse pleasure in seeing them fail. Such a pleasure it'd be great if there was a really fun word to describe it...
Or the researcher read what they wanted to into it. It would be interesting to ask them what they did before to learn things, how much they read, etc. If they were illiterate and uneducated, and got voice AI telling them stuff that would be common sense for anyone with a high school education, I can see how it might make them more effective at whatever they do. But I wouldn’t really blame AI in the way that’s implied.
Human brains were shaped over thousands of years of adaptation for warfare. Just look at how creative and advanced the tactics of other guerrilla forces (like the Taliban and Viet Cong) got, despite their very limited resources. None of that needs a high school education.
It's not about education itself necessarily, but I'd bet any amount of money that most terrorists' IQ is below the overall human average. The average terrorist is not that innovative or creative so the most mundane GPT "insight" will likely be a smarter course of action than whatever their first idea would have been.
If anything, the average terrorist is probably smarter than the average member of their surrounding societies, since you need a minimum amount of education to understand the ideology motivating the terrorism. Don't forget that Taliban literally means "students." The number of times someone tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan suggests that it's not an easy feat that any fool could have done, but the Taliban managed to do it twice.
Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none. Think open-source developers competing with commercial offerings maintained by huge teams. Terrorists building IEDs when their enemy has a full military-industrial complex are much the same. They just really believe their ideology. On this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives is a good read.
> Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none.
Embracing and believing this destructive ideology itself in the first place, when you could devote your life to so many better[1] things, is the sign of stupidity I mean.
Believing that God wants you to murder other people (heck, even babies) over things such as who's worshiping Him correctly... stupid.
1. Better for... you name it: Your quality of life, welfare of other human beings, economically, spiritually, environmentally.
Do you have some evidence to suggest mundane GPT insights would not be smarter than the average human's idea? There's a reason so many are completely abdicating any responsibility to think to an LLM, and I'd bet any amount of money it's not because they think the LLM is dumber than them.
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed.
They used to try to overpower people. We have 600 and that guard post has 400. We should be able to win. That type of logic.
> With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units
Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective. Also it's possible smaller troop movements are less easily noticeable.
That's just one very reasonable interpretation. Am I missing something?
> Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective
and that has to be in the first chapter of every first year battle strategy/tactic book on the planet. They would learn more tactics much faster by just playing bf6 as a team and going through the tutorials.
It's like the Bill Hicks bit about the number of losses in Desert Storm. Iraqi casualties: 20,000 - 50,000. US casualties: 147. "Does that mean if we sent 148 guys we still would have won?"
After a cursory read of the PDF, my impression is that the methodology is sound, but the results are blown out of proportion. Of course, if the title was "Boko Haram's internal hearsay about their use of AI", it would draw much less attention.
The weak part is that the interview were with only 15 persons that had knowledge about AI. But, from what I understand, but they never used it themselves. Only the top commanders and the specialized units could send prompts. So it's hard to guess what is the real AI use from a few indirect statements. For example, the commanders could have decided to spread the rumor they were using AI a lot, even if they mostly used plain web search, because they thought it would boost the morale.
For instance, why would anyone pay an AI service to get basic help like that:
> AI provided both immediate technical fixes by teaching “how to uncouple the gun by washing it with diesel” and tactical guidance, in terms of “how to change the military formation so that fighters with jammed guns move to the back and others take their positions until the problem is solved.”
BTW, the paper does explain that Boko Haram was initially just a plain sect, rather living peacefully. Then "following a violent government crackdown and Yusuf’s death in police custody in 2009, the movement turned into a jihadist insurgency". And the last time I read a report by Amnesty International about the conflict, it estimated that 55 % of civilian casualties were caused by the terrorist group, and 45 % by the security forces. The Nigerian army sometimes razed whole villages. Like always, the world is not black and white, good guys and bad guys.
Next on breaking news, terrorist groups use search engines, they use news sites to figure out what's going on in the world, they use banks, they use weather sites for planning, they use email, cars, pen, of course AI too, so if AI should be regulated, let's remember to ban all the things.
“Boko” is actually a loanword from “book” so it literally means they want to forbid “book-learning”.
It is also instructive to understand that the Quran calls Jews and Christians “People of the Book”, in other words, people who read and believe the Bible.
Trying to prevent this will cause the same outcome as trying to prevent terrorists from using search engines: it'll only disproportionately harm regular users. Imagine if current AI misuse paranoia would've been applied to search engines, internet libraries (knowledge is useful for planning acts of terrorism), and computing in general.
They don't have nearly enough compute to be competitive on pretraining and distillation is exponentially cheaper.
It's literally the same tactic they do in every industry. Steal top IP, gov funding, ban the company they stole from domestically while driving cost to zero, try to kill the original IP creators.
They are actively in the process of doing this with Tesla as we speak. And are in the phase of pushing them out domestically and trying to destroy tesla marketshare globally.
They have obvious skills and add a lot of value while doing this but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
It's competition, buddy. If you don't think we got big the same way you're nuts. And anyone who is trying to kill tesla has my money.
Anyway, I don't think there's much worth stealing at the moment. Chinese models provide much better value than any american firm.
> but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
A) good luck trying to prevent access to a service and b) this is obvious cope. Of course the chinese can compete; there's no american magic beyond "having loads of money and nearby universities", which china has too.
A foreign government state sponsoring IP theft and manipulating markets for unfair competition.
Here's a 1:1 example if the USA did exactly the same thing.
1. CIA and Ford work together to steal mercedes IP
2. Gov gives money to Ford to build the same car half the price
3. Throw as many roadblocks at mercedes regulation wise as possible until it is not financially viable to sell in US anymore.
4. Sell the same car back to germany at half the cost they have it because mercedes isn't state sponsored
5. Crush mercedes who created the better car to begin with.
That's not only dishonest but actually harmful for innovation and economic growth. China has done this Sooooo many times it's absurd.
If you think any model coming out of china is not containing as much stolen data as humanly possible from the actual innovators u crazy.
Using a chinese model is like watching pirated films. If you actually support the people who make the thing you love then you don't do that.
We then get hit with chinese sponsored propoganda of "the big labs stole artist images to begin with so they can't complain" and act like LLMs didn't create an entire new category of thing.
So much propaganda so many lies and dishonesty because at the end of the day China knows it's not innovative enough to compete. It hopes to hobble our abilities while they frantically steal to catch up.
But the truth is that if China ever gets a lead over US in any innovation they will instantly kill any openess. If chinese AI ever passes US it's likely you'll never touch that model ever.
Just like the russians they use our own culture against us and it's absurd people fall for it.
AI providers like openAI or Anthropic are already on the hook for OFAC compliance, so if any terrorist group is proven to access their APIs they can face huge fines.
The same game played out in the crypto space. Local models like local wallets can't be regulated.
Accessing foreign services can't be controlled.
But regulated companies are fully liable for any use of their tools by terrorist organizations.
This is not about the citizens, it's about the companies protecting themselves.
Not at all, even in the Borno state where Boko Haram and ISWAP are present, towns are controlled by the government, I don't think there is a single town that is controlled by Boko Haram/ISWAP right now.
Unless by "the left" you mean some solitary idiot (or troll) on tiktok who just went to college.
In the west Boko Haram's goal seem closer to groups on the right than anyone on "the left". eg suppressing women's rights, more religion in school/govt, homosexuality etc
> We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it. The next time we attacked, we could jump.
Now listen, I'm not saying we need to give these guys more AI, but it clearly isn't yielding bad outcomes for us here.
"You're absolutely correct! For it to be a good practice ground you need to fill the trenches with broken glass and light the whole thing on fire"
> We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process.
Is it providing material aid to terrorists to point out that maybe a hole filled with water would have been a better practice environment?
I assume you're asking in jest, but having experience in the matter:
Any information you give to someone/group, where you know or have good reason to believe it will be used for terrorism purposes (including training), does put you liable for providing material aid to terrorists.
This comment will definitely get you on a list somewhere. Either the CIA or my favorite comments on hn, maybe both.
Is this a riddle where you happen to work for the CIA?
Using water is like assuming the testing environment and production are the same.
I always make sure that a test failure carries the same financial loss as a production outage. Otherwise engineers just won't try hard enough.
These safeties in AI are out of control. Who knows where we would be if they were using heretic models.
I would pay premium coin for a slaanesh AI model
I suddenly feel so much more comfortable with the US "warfighters" using LLMs for everything.
The water damage would ruin the motorcycles. They can always get more jumpers. The hard part is motivating them!
I wouldn't think the glass and fire would do them a lot of good either.
US Congressman Scott Perry said that USA has financed Boko Haram and other similar groups (remember how Pentagon and CIA independently backed different terrorist groups in Syria, that even fought each other?)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl...
Not gonna lie, I'd rather attack with 26 fighters that haven't survived lots of jump attempts than 8 who are much more confident in their motorbike stunt riding but presumably still aren't bulletproof.
But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
This is a scene in Catch22 IIRC where they decide to stop training the soldiers who need to parachute behind enemy lines because the fatality rate of training was so high that mathematically it made more sense to send in untrained soldiers.
This also reminds me of a offhanded remark in a SsethTzeentach review where he criticizes the Titanic passengers for not having the decency to be ballast and plug the hole with their own bodies
> But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
“unfortunately, my seven remaining comrades died in the process and I can't train anymore since there's no one to shoot at me”.
Well that’s easy, start shooting yourself in the foot with .22 until you develop a tolerance and bump up to .380!
> maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?
Practice makes perfect!
You start with .22 and build up resistance from there.
I'd suggest starting with a 2mm Kolibri, if you can find one.
You need Jean Claude for that.
That's how you get Gun Kata
If anything the leadership gave BS answers to the journalist for the exact reaction HN is portraying right now.
"They're so dumb AI is harmless" is a danerous take when the people in charge are often times more educated than an average westener. They also are decent at propoganda (you have certainly consumed pumped or direct propoganda from terrorist orgs).
Their leaders are often university grads from the west. It is smart (enough) people leading delusional farmers but the article is clear that the farmers are just given AI commands from the leadership. There's still strong asymetry occuring here that more funded orgs have the better AI but if AI flattens and opensource catches up it's gonna be a real interesting world where every terrorist also has a team of advanced weapon engineers and tacticians available.
Honestly this sounds so outlandish that it makes me skeptical of the whole thing.
They didn't stop after the first guy died? Or the tenth? Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next?
And where's the video? Terrorist groups love propaganda footage, if they were doing motorcycle stunts like Evel Knievel they'd be bragging about it everywhere.
If they were wary of dying, they wouldn't be in the business of terrorism in the first place. Also, they almost certainly believe in a better afterlife. Reminds of the old animated short: Saga of Bjorn[1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV5w262XvCU
Surely even terrorists want to die for a cause, not during practice.
Are you granted your virgins if you do not take out any infidel?
Bokom Haram regularly kidnaps children. The girls become “wives”. The boys become the next generation of soldier.
Yeah this didn't happen. If someone is cracy enough to practice with holes filled with glass on fire why trust them at all about being cracy in the first place?
where'd they get so much broken glass that it would fill a hole anyway? They just have that much glass on hand?
Erm, if you have 18 guys to spend on training, you also have some empty bottles or access to a place where there are more empty bottles.
Whether crazy people are actually crazy enough to literally do what a LLM gave them as a action sequence from movie inspiration - I have no idea. But I doubt it here.
To be fair, guy #11 was a lot better at prompting
> Guy #11 just looked at the pile of corpses and was like, hell yeah I'm gonna try next?
Have you never seen a kung-fu movie? Of course that's what happens when a large group attack a superior solitary opponent.
Honestly, Boko Haram is in general just bad at propaganda and mostly confines said propaganda to Nigeria.
Those 8 that survived clearly gained an edge by putting glue on their pizza.
Nobody tell them that there are models that work much better!
But on a much more serious note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is terrible. I'd have called it unforgivable, but LLMs are a tough beast to tame in the best of situations... and I'm not really sure if chatgpt ever deserved to be forgived.
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
I feel like I'm missing something though. You can open LM Studio right now and download any model with "heretic" or "uncensored" in the name and it will happily do anything you want with no restrictions whatsoever. What's the point of trying to jailbreak ChatGPT? Is it that much better if all you want is just some instructions to make bombs or whatever? (admittedly - I have no idea if these instructions are actually worth anything, but the models will not object to any question)
Truly very very special terrorists. No wonder other terror groups steer clear of them. Must be all the wolf cola they consume.
AI, at least llms , are really really horrible at basic arithmetic
Some’ve been employing python for math by default for a year or so right?
And 60 years ago we thought Steve McQueen was the shit.
I have no doubt terrorists are aided by LLMs in a general sense, but am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, and would want to see real evidence, not an interview snippet.
It's never been particularly difficult to discern how to assemble a bomb, or C4, or napalm, or.... etc. Difficulty in accessibility of violence has never been what protected society. Except, I'm willing to bet, in FBI funding meetings.
Has it become harder to find that information without setting off the fed’s alarm bells?
Was fascinated to learn the PRISM news reduced traffic to privacy-relevant Wikipedia articles, a chilling effect in that case, but indicates tech-savvy folks worry about doing anything on clearnet.
…then again since they’re using CLOUD models, guess my comment doesn’t make much sense…
Why would it matter if the feds were alerted if the user were in west Africa?
99.99% of the people consuming that content are law abiding (relatively), "normal" citizens, including probably half of 13 year old boys. I'm sure the feds have access to the "list", but it is virtually useless until after the fact when they can tell the jury "and you see here, they looked it up!"
> they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t
Researching your way through Wikipedia and the likes certainly counts as "Western education", which as we all know is forbidden by their name. Having an agent read the forbidden stuff for them is just the loophole they needed!
Sounds like the Orthodox Jews who hire people to turn on the lights for them on the Sabbath.
Or the Mormon teens who supposedly recruit their friends to bounce the mattress while “soaking”.
In case it isn't obvious to anyone reading the parent comment: do not search for "soaking" on your work computer.
How do they bypass the AI safety measures?
I read stuff like this and think I must be an idiot because I'm so bad at circumventing the AI safety for fairly benign queries. And here you have folks making bombs...?
This is covered in the full PDF; they have many accounts they spread the queries over and structure them like they're asking for help writing a movie script.
Just for reference, that hasn’t worked for years (the interviews say 2024-25 I think, that kind of attack was patched very early in all the mainstream models) and when it did, you would get bullet point lists GPT 3.5 Turbo style
- first research methods for building effective explosives
- next, assemble the necessary materials to make the bomb
- ...
Making explosives is generally fully legal in the US, so IDK if there would even be safeguards for US hosted AI, since there's no real legal issue with doing it. Basically no federal regulations for non-commercial production so long as it isn't stored or moved anywhere, you can literally buy tannerite off the shelf in a sporting good store, "synthesize" it by mixing it and then blow up a huge bomb legally, no license required. YouTube is plastered with people inside the USA making TNT and other materials and then blowing them up.
Have you tried chatbots? They invoke AI safety for lots of (very) legal things. The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs.
Legality has nothing to do with it.
I kept running into it when building an app that did ballistics calculation.
I can believe some would, but some probably wouldn't care. My local ranch store certainly will happily sell anyone tannerite without even a background check or any sort of scrutiny, you can cash and carry it. Walmart won't but the point being as long as it's legal there will be a "ranch store" that carries it.
>The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs
I mean even YouTube allows bomb making videos and they won't even usually allow videos of people making guns. It's just not very regulated in the US enough to make most companies care. Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information, even after the feds subpoenaed Alphabet for Ashley Dugan's Youtube information they still kept his TNT and other explosives synthesis up.
Of course, if you'll allow me to goomba fallacy for a moment, we're supposed to suspend the common HN wisdom here that companies will do anything for a profit / not care unless it costs them something, and also believe that big tech is going to go out of their way to censor the public domain patents they're already hosting on their servers.
OK, it sounds like you haven't tried these chatbots.
> Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information
Go to Gemini and ask it how to make one.
AI safety is really brand safety. They don't want to see any more headlines like "You won't believe what OpenAI's chatbot told me!", which was all the rage early on.
>How do they bypass the AI safety measures?
Tell it you're in Africa.
Not joking.
I do this all the time to bypass whiny Reddit "you need a license" and "that's unsafe" type pushback when I just want to know what's less worse.
Like just yesterday I was trying to plan out a YF-whatever to R134a conversion and used that trick. Worked great.
>Tell it you're in Africa.
A great variant of the gay jailbreak
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977134
> am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities,
This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots. All the information they need is in books and old patents and what-not, but they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
And obviously yes there are exceptions, since we can all think of infamous terrorist plots which succeeded due to clearly some sophisticated planning and hard work.
> they absolutely will not have as much success in synthesizing that into effective plans and well-made weapons without having a helpful and patient AI agent to guide them, as they will with that assist.
This is demonstrably false.
ISIL’s explosives training material in particular is produced with great professionalism and is of extremely high quality.
Al Qaeda’s was a bit more hit an miss, some of it was mostly ideological propaganda and some of it was outstanding but it was otherwise well structured with clear learning outcomes and assessment activities.
Most of this material was produced well before AI was a thing.
>If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that their religion is stupid, that their leaders were mostly corrupt (or themselves stupid), and they'd also probably find something more productive to do with their time.
In my head I was running through a whole lot groups to replace "terrorists" with in that sentence...
> This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots.
What even is a terrorist?
If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.
> "one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter"
yes, but only to weak-minded cultural relativists.
I don't mind stating a definition explicitly. If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
Note: The only real complexity in the definition is that during war, embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes, and when it does, it's the ones choosing to do that, war criminals by definition, who bear the responsibility for those innocent deaths when those locations then become legitimate military targets.
I'll omit giving examples to avoid triggering those who like to "bothsides" some of the more well-known terrorist groups lately.
> If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
That's a great example of selection bias: if they were intelligent enough to be capable of causing harm at that scale, they would have immediately realized the new guy suggesting targets and offering to buy them explosives was an FBI agent.
Boko Haram is not a mentally disabled person tricked by the FBI they are real terrorists who attack schools to stop children from learning. They're the epitome of stupid and backwards.
Mild terrorist sympathy right here.
Just look up mass casualty events across the middle east it's very obvious what a terrorist is.
> If the terrorists were very smart, they'd realize that...
There are a lot of very smart people joining cults, including people who just wanted to study them and were fully aware that what they believed in was nonsense. Terrorist groups are cults.
Just because you consider yourself smart because you have a PhD, high IQ, built a successful company or practice some intellectual activity and are good at it doesn't mean you are immune to the manipulation tactics used by cults. Once sufficiently brainwashed, your judgment will get clouded, but it doesn't mean you will lose your technical skills, which you will put to the service of the cult.
Think about Nazi Germany. Germans weren't idiots, the simple fact that most of the world had to turn against them to defeat them is proof enough. But they still managed to get manipulated into committing the worst crimes.
The reason it worked is not stupidity, it is misery. They were at their lowest following WW1, and Hitler promised them better. Same idea for terrorist groups and other cults, people who are experiencing hardships are the easiest to indoctrinate, and there is no shortage of such people in Nigeria.
There's lots of knowledge out there about stuff like this. Milennia of humans tinkering with things that go boom. Surfacing it more easily has value (in a manner of speaking; as the @dril tweet goes, "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them'").
It’s that thing where a young child is incapable of realizing their lies are obvious. There’s a kind of pathetic sadness when adults do it.
And I met a Boko General and he said, "Sir, please, sir, build up our military" while fighting away tears.
How many of those are available in the language(s) they speak, though? AI might have been used as a glorified Google Translate here.
LLMs are derived from Google Translate in the first place. That’s the research that was happening that led to the transformer.
Translation is what they are best at.
Language -> any translator -> LLM -> translator -> original language
I agree with other commenters that the claims made in the report are strange.
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed. With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units.
The other quotes and use cases could make sense in terms of using AI jailbreaks to find information more easily, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the clueless researcher just get trolled?
This is a real thing, it's why units like Sturmtruppen or special forces units have been successful throughout history - a smaller, better trained and coordinated force is often better than a large, uncoordinated mob. _Especially_ if your force is made up of people willing to do suicide attacks. Or if you goal is not to take and hold territory, but to trade lives for terror and body count.
A wave of 1000 soldiers won't break a trench line, but a squad of infiltrators can sneak in and make entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtroopers_(Imperial_German...
I don't think that's the point of suspicion. Smaller vs larger group tactics have been available in pretty much any place you look. It's in movies. It's in games. It's in books. Like actual military strategy books studied by military students. This has been available for much longer than LLMs.
The books exist, but those books are read by few outside military leadership. The good ones come from leaders who have been there, and they skip over the basics. Being able to talk to a chatbot that can get people past the classic military mistakes could make a force far more effective. Maybe. It's not going to create a Giap or a Rommel, but it might keep a force from repeating classic military mistakes.
There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.
A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.
The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24842
[2] https://angrystaffofficer.com/
I guess they aren't reading Art of War either. Knowing one's enemy blah blah. People unwilling to learn from others are doomed to repeat other's failures. In some situations, there's a perverse pleasure in seeing them fail. Such a pleasure it'd be great if there was a really fun word to describe it...
Boko Haram wouldn't have read any of those books because they banned the reading of any book except the Koran.
So they are okay reading the non-Koran text from the bot?
Yup. If you're looking for intelligence or logical consistency, you won't find it here.
This is why Russians now attack in teams of just two, down from dozens in 2022.
Or the researcher read what they wanted to into it. It would be interesting to ask them what they did before to learn things, how much they read, etc. If they were illiterate and uneducated, and got voice AI telling them stuff that would be common sense for anyone with a high school education, I can see how it might make them more effective at whatever they do. But I wouldn’t really blame AI in the way that’s implied.
Human brains were shaped over thousands of years of adaptation for warfare. Just look at how creative and advanced the tactics of other guerrilla forces (like the Taliban and Viet Cong) got, despite their very limited resources. None of that needs a high school education.
It's not about education itself necessarily, but I'd bet any amount of money that most terrorists' IQ is below the overall human average. The average terrorist is not that innovative or creative so the most mundane GPT "insight" will likely be a smarter course of action than whatever their first idea would have been.
If anything, the average terrorist is probably smarter than the average member of their surrounding societies, since you need a minimum amount of education to understand the ideology motivating the terrorism. Don't forget that Taliban literally means "students." The number of times someone tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan suggests that it's not an easy feat that any fool could have done, but the Taliban managed to do it twice.
Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none. Think open-source developers competing with commercial offerings maintained by huge teams. Terrorists building IEDs when their enemy has a full military-industrial complex are much the same. They just really believe their ideology. On this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives is a good read.
> Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none.
Embracing and believing this destructive ideology itself in the first place, when you could devote your life to so many better[1] things, is the sign of stupidity I mean.
Believing that God wants you to murder other people (heck, even babies) over things such as who's worshiping Him correctly... stupid.
1. Better for... you name it: Your quality of life, welfare of other human beings, economically, spiritually, environmentally.
Do you have some evidence to suggest mundane GPT insights would not be smarter than the average human's idea? There's a reason so many are completely abdicating any responsibility to think to an LLM, and I'd bet any amount of money it's not because they think the LLM is dumber than them.
You don’t think that there were highly educated people in leadership roles in the Taliban or Viet Cong?
You might want to research the origins of the Taliban a little more.
Why is it a strange claim?
> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed.
They used to try to overpower people. We have 600 and that guard post has 400. We should be able to win. That type of logic.
> With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units
Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective. Also it's possible smaller troop movements are less easily noticeable.
That's just one very reasonable interpretation. Am I missing something?
> Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective
and that has to be in the first chapter of every first year battle strategy/tactic book on the planet. They would learn more tactics much faster by just playing bf6 as a team and going through the tutorials.
You send 200 fighters and 60 get killed. In the same situation, if you send 20, what do you expect would happen? (I mean, you won't lose 60...)
It's like the Bill Hicks bit about the number of losses in Desert Storm. Iraqi casualties: 20,000 - 50,000. US casualties: 147. "Does that mean if we sent 148 guys we still would have won?"
Depends. If the 20 are more spread out and your enemy is using inaccurate weapons, then maybe more would survive.
After a cursory read of the PDF, my impression is that the methodology is sound, but the results are blown out of proportion. Of course, if the title was "Boko Haram's internal hearsay about their use of AI", it would draw much less attention.
The weak part is that the interview were with only 15 persons that had knowledge about AI. But, from what I understand, but they never used it themselves. Only the top commanders and the specialized units could send prompts. So it's hard to guess what is the real AI use from a few indirect statements. For example, the commanders could have decided to spread the rumor they were using AI a lot, even if they mostly used plain web search, because they thought it would boost the morale.
For instance, why would anyone pay an AI service to get basic help like that:
> AI provided both immediate technical fixes by teaching “how to uncouple the gun by washing it with diesel” and tactical guidance, in terms of “how to change the military formation so that fighters with jammed guns move to the back and others take their positions until the problem is solved.”
BTW, the paper does explain that Boko Haram was initially just a plain sect, rather living peacefully. Then "following a violent government crackdown and Yusuf’s death in police custody in 2009, the movement turned into a jihadist insurgency". And the last time I read a report by Amnesty International about the conflict, it estimated that 55 % of civilian casualties were caused by the terrorist group, and 45 % by the security forces. The Nigerian army sometimes razed whole villages. Like always, the world is not black and white, good guys and bad guys.
I just asked for a poop pic from Lumo and it said it can't make a picture of bodily functions.
Maybe I should have asked for help unjamming my AK47 instead?
These safeguard guardrails are apparently only good at stopping poop pics.
Next on breaking news, terrorist groups use search engines, they use news sites to figure out what's going on in the world, they use banks, they use weather sites for planning, they use email, cars, pen, of course AI too, so if AI should be regulated, let's remember to ban all the things.
"Boko Haram" translates to "Western education is forbidden". Using Western AI as an educational tool seems like hypocrisy.
Are you sure "education" doesn't actually mean "ideology"?
“Boko” is actually a loanword from “book” so it literally means they want to forbid “book-learning”.
It is also instructive to understand that the Quran calls Jews and Christians “People of the Book”, in other words, people who read and believe the Bible.
Trying to prevent this will cause the same outcome as trying to prevent terrorists from using search engines: it'll only disproportionately harm regular users. Imagine if current AI misuse paranoia would've been applied to search engines, internet libraries (knowledge is useful for planning acts of terrorism), and computing in general.
I noticed the nytimes just published an article about this.
How Terrorist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...
If you opened the OP link, you missed the section "Featured in The New York Times".
AI services will need KYC soon?
The NYT article is probably propaganda in service of that, that’s what the big AI companies want, it’s part of regulatory capture.
If the impact of AI is comparable to the atomic bomb then the least they could do is try to filter out terrorists.
I think this is a very convincing argument to regulate the space more.
Do you know what Poe’s law is?
...because terrorists in western africa are willing to follow american regulations? I hope this is satire.
American AI labs -> industrial chinese scaping -> opensource LLM -> boko haram
It's a supply chain the US actually can easily control with KYC.
I think the chinese are doing just fine by themselves at this point
As the largest AI scappers on the planet.. sure
They don't have nearly enough compute to be competitive on pretraining and distillation is exponentially cheaper.
It's literally the same tactic they do in every industry. Steal top IP, gov funding, ban the company they stole from domestically while driving cost to zero, try to kill the original IP creators.
They are actively in the process of doing this with Tesla as we speak. And are in the phase of pushing them out domestically and trying to destroy tesla marketshare globally.
They have obvious skills and add a lot of value while doing this but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
> Steal
It's competition, buddy. If you don't think we got big the same way you're nuts. And anyone who is trying to kill tesla has my money.
Anyway, I don't think there's much worth stealing at the moment. Chinese models provide much better value than any american firm.
> but US could stop all of this by simply stopping their supply.
A) good luck trying to prevent access to a service and b) this is obvious cope. Of course the chinese can compete; there's no american magic beyond "having loads of money and nearby universities", which china has too.
It's... the opposite of competition?
A foreign government state sponsoring IP theft and manipulating markets for unfair competition.
Here's a 1:1 example if the USA did exactly the same thing.
1. CIA and Ford work together to steal mercedes IP 2. Gov gives money to Ford to build the same car half the price 3. Throw as many roadblocks at mercedes regulation wise as possible until it is not financially viable to sell in US anymore. 4. Sell the same car back to germany at half the cost they have it because mercedes isn't state sponsored 5. Crush mercedes who created the better car to begin with.
That's not only dishonest but actually harmful for innovation and economic growth. China has done this Sooooo many times it's absurd.
Anthropic/OpenAI should have full control over who accesses their service since it's basically an API they provide.
Chinese models are great, nobody says otherwise but many of the publicly available ones are distilled and not trained from scratch.
Adding KYC would crack down on distilling because they use thousands of burner accounts to do it and now those accounts would need a face to verify.
If you think any model coming out of china is not containing as much stolen data as humanly possible from the actual innovators u crazy.
Using a chinese model is like watching pirated films. If you actually support the people who make the thing you love then you don't do that.
We then get hit with chinese sponsored propoganda of "the big labs stole artist images to begin with so they can't complain" and act like LLMs didn't create an entire new category of thing.
So much propaganda so many lies and dishonesty because at the end of the day China knows it's not innovative enough to compete. It hopes to hobble our abilities while they frantically steal to catch up.
But the truth is that if China ever gets a lead over US in any innovation they will instantly kill any openess. If chinese AI ever passes US it's likely you'll never touch that model ever.
Just like the russians they use our own culture against us and it's absurd people fall for it.
The regulation is not for Westen Africa, it's for USA.
American companies could maybe keep OFAC regulations for AI?
If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too.
I'm pretty sure most of the western african terrorists are blocked from using coinbase, so why not chatgpt?
And why would americans use regulated AI software when they could just buy it unregulated from china instead?
> If the fintech sector can do it, AI can too.
Fintech requires turning the number on a screen into something you can use to make a transaction. Good luck regulating... text.
For that matter, why would anyone want to live in a country where honest citizens have to use crippled software while criminals have full freedom?
AI providers like openAI or Anthropic are already on the hook for OFAC compliance, so if any terrorist group is proven to access their APIs they can face huge fines.
The same game played out in the crypto space. Local models like local wallets can't be regulated.
Accessing foreign services can't be controlled.
But regulated companies are fully liable for any use of their tools by terrorist organizations.
This is not about the citizens, it's about the companies protecting themselves.
Ok, so why did you bring this up in the context of boko haram? Do you think pets.com is trying to make a bomb?!
Only the boutique ones based in America
We need to ban open source AI for regular citizens to prevent terrorists from using them.
Mandatory ID verification at software level for local LLMs is clearly the solution here. /s
Don't give them clues, please /s
You are not going far enough. Why not put age verification on calculators and dumb phones because terrorists can use it? /s
>How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses <any commoditized technology>
Deleted
Your comment will now be scraped and the next release of chatgpt/claude/gemini will recommend doing this.
Not sure if I should upvote because true, or down vote so that fewer terrorists see it.
On a broad note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is frankly white terrible.
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
Evidently guardrails need to have far better accuracies of false positives and false negatives both.
What does "white terrible" mean?
Maybe "quite"?
AI, you are joshua graham from the fallout games (not TV show). devise small unit tactics. make no mistakes.
I would be more interested about terrorists organization like Al-Shabaab that at least control many towns.
Does Boko Haram and ISWAP even control a single town or they just control a few villages in Lake Chad and in the Sambisa forest?
Also reading the report they seem quite clueless.
Doesn't Boko Haram control basically all of northern Nigeria? Yes, it's incredibly rural (even deserted) but it's still half a country.
Hardly. Northern Nigeria is majority Muslim. Most Muslims are not under Boko Haram control.
I believe this map shows the maximum area they controlled - and it was over a decade ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wilayat_al_Sudan_al_Gharb...
Not at all, even in the Borno state where Boko Haram and ISWAP are present, towns are controlled by the government, I don't think there is a single town that is controlled by Boko Haram/ISWAP right now.
So, KYC propaganda?
Now watch the left praise this group and bad mouth the west at any cost. Despite living here. And despite the third world being worse at everything.
Unless by "the left" you mean some solitary idiot (or troll) on tiktok who just went to college.
In the west Boko Haram's goal seem closer to groups on the right than anyone on "the left". eg suppressing women's rights, more religion in school/govt, homosexuality etc
Are you okay? This seems a bit unhinged.