Think of all the complete garbage interactions you'd have to sift through to find anything useful from a national security standpoint. The data is practically obfuscated by virtue of its banality.
Raw data with time-series significance is their absolute favorite. You might argue something like Google Maps data is "obfuscated by virtue of its banality" until you catch the right person in the wrong place. ChatGPT sessions are the same way, and it's going to be fed into aggregate surveillance systems in the way modern telecom and advertiser data is.
-After Boston, Paris, Manchester, and other attacks, post-mortems showed the perpetrators were already in government databases. Analysts simply didn’t connect the dots amid the flood of benign hits. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/whole-haystack
-Independent tallies suggest dozens of civilians killed for every intended high-value target in Yemen and Pakistan, largely because metadata mis-identifies phones that change pockets. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/36962/pdf
Meta data and investigation.
> That's not something a search function can distinguish.
We know that it can narrow down hugely from the initial volume.
> It requires a human to sift through that data.
Yes, the point of collating, analysing, and searching data is not to make final judgements but to find targets for investigation by the available agents. That's the same reason we all use search engines, to narrow down, they never produce what we intend by intention alone, we still have to read the final results. Magic is still some way off.
You're acting as if we can automate humans out of the loop entirely, which would be a straw man. Is anyone saying we can get rid of the police or security agencies by using AI? Or perhaps AI will become the police, perhaps it will conduct traffic stops using driverless cars and robots? I suppose it could happen, though I'm not sure what the relevance would be here.
"Corporations and the US government are spending money on it, so it must be useful." Are you serious? Lmao.