Criminal Misuse Workstream Lead

The Crime and Social Destabilisation (Societal Impacts) Team: AISI is launching a new Crime and Social Destabilisation workstream, focussed on assessing and mitigating societal-level harms caused by advanced AI systems, particularly in the areas of criminal activity, including mis/disinformation, radicalisation, social engineering, and fraud. The team will be responsible for advancing the state of science in evaluating these risks – with a goal to ensure that AI systems do not become tools for large-scale societal disruption. We are starting by recruiting an ambitious workstream lead to spearhead the work.

The workstream will be situated within AISI’s Research Unit, and you will report to Chris Summerfield, our Societal Impacts Research Director.

Role Summary

As workstream lead of a novel team, you will build a team to evaluate and mitigate some of the pressing societal-level risks that Frontier AI systems may exacerbate, including radicalization, misinformation, fraud, and social engineering. You will need to:

• Build and lead a talent-dense, multidisciplinary, and mission-driven team;
• Develop and deliver a strategy for building a cutting-edge crime and social destabilisation research agenda;
• Develop cutting edge evaluations which relate to these threat-models which can reliably assess the capability of Frontier AI systems;
• Deliver additional impactful research by overseeing a diverse portfolio of research projects, potentially including a portfolio of externally delivered research;
• Ensure that research outcomes are disseminated to relevant stakeholders within government and the wider community;
• Forge relationships with key partners in industry, academia, and across Government, including the national security community;
• Act as part of AISI’s overall leadership team, setting the culture and supporting staff.

The position offers a unique opportunity to push forward an emerging field, whilst part of an organization that is a unique and fast-growing presence in AI research and governance.

Person specification:

You may be a good fit if you have some of the following skills, experience, and attitudes:

• A track record of working to ensure positive outcomes for all of society from the creation of AI systems;
• Strong track record of leading multidisciplinary teams to deliver multiple exceptional scientific breakthroughs or high-quality products. We’re looking for evidence of an ability to lead exceptional teams;
• Strong experience with mentorship of more junior team members;
• Comprehensive understanding of large language models (e.g. GPT-4), including both a broad understanding of the literature and hands-on experience with leading work that involves pre-training or fine-tuning LLMs;
• Demonstrable commitment to improving scientific standards and rigour, through the development and implementation of best practice research methods;
• Excellent communication skills, with a track record of translating complex research findings into actionable insights for policy makers;
• Experience working at the intersection of criminal activity technology, including digital platforms and artificial intelligence.

This post requires Security Clearance (SC) as a minimum, and a willingness to undergo Developed Vetting (DV) if required. This is a UK Nationals only post, as it is a reserved position. More detail on Security Clearances can be found on the UK Government website.