> 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?)
Scott Perry didn't present any evidence for those claims. Ideologically he is opposed to the humanitarian work USAID does around the world, and he cheered as Elon Musk dismantled the agency.
Perry was also one of the key figures in the criminal conspiracy trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election and overthrow the US government to install Donald Trump as a dictator based on a series of outrageous lies. If Trump hadn't been elected again in 2024, interrupting the relevant investigations, there's a decent chance Perry would be either on trial or perhaps even already convicted for his crimes (conscious of his guilt, he directly asked Trump for a pardon).
I wouldn't consider any claims he makes credible without some corroborating evidence.
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
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?
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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'").
> 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.
> 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.
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.
His videos of making them were on YouTube for years, publicly. It's legal to synthesize the explosives he made. What they did was charge him for the first amendment protected activity that a terrorist then found, and then they claimed that because he made some money because a few people donated a small amount to him for making the videos, and thus he needed a commercial license for being in the business of making explosives.
By the way this is the same thing they tried to charge FPSRussia (the first time, before they convicted him for weed) for and failed.
You didn't read what I said. Try reading the law instead, or even the charge. It's for being in the business of manufacturing explosives without a license. A license isn't needed to manufacture explosives. One is needed to manufacture them as a business venture. They are claiming since he got a little money from Youtube or viewers he was in the business and that was illegal.
This failed when they tried it with FPSRussia.
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>I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory.
Different than what you said initially which was merely making them, which is why I clarified.
>> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use.
engaging in business of your own use is not same as non-business of your own use. It's not uncommon for a business to use explosives for their own use as course of operations. It is also not uncommon for people to synthesize and use tannerite recreationally without a license, legally, for non-business use.
>I did read what you said; that's why I quoted part of it.
If you read it then you know you maliciously selectively quoted it then. If that were the end of it and that made it legal, I would have stopped there, but you cut it off there because it was more convenient to your rebuttal to ignore the rest. I only thought you had not read it, because I was being charitable to try and assume good faith.
> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
Their brains are the same, what differs is the environment.
Humanity's superpower is the ability to copy and mirror each other very effectively.
It does not require advanced awareness or intelligence to do it. Most people copy others subconsciously!
Majority of people won't contribute anything technologically, but they sure as hell can copy.
What is normal? You know how girls dress, let’s say in the Andes? Is that normal? Or by normal you mean what’s fashion in NY? Or perhaps what the majority of people wears today? Or what the majority of people have worn in the past?
Very little of what the west does can be considered normal.
> Can't let their underage harem girls dress normally
If you use a strict definition of normal, like practiced by a larger proportion of the world, then they are actually normal and we are WEIRD. If you add history into the mix then that type of dressing was common in basically the vast majority of cultures for the vast majority of history
Have you just discovered the concept that humans are all humans, and all our achievements are just a mountain of knowledge we stand upon, from first principles?
Humans are human, someone being born in Africa doesn't magically mean that they will never understand technology.
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"
Is it providing material aid to terrorists to point out that maybe a hole filled with water would have been a better practice environment?
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.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl...
Perry was also one of the key figures in the criminal conspiracy trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election and overthrow the US government to install Donald Trump as a dictator based on a series of outrageous lies. If Trump hadn't been elected again in 2024, interrupting the relevant investigations, there's a decent chance Perry would be either on trial or perhaps even already convicted for his crimes (conscious of his guilt, he directly asked Trump for a pardon).
I wouldn't consider any claims he makes credible without some corroborating evidence.
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”.
Practice makes perfect!
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV5w262XvCU
Have you never seen a kung-fu movie? Of course that's what happens when a large group attack a superior solitary opponent.
It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.
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.
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...?
- first research methods for building effective explosives
- next, assemble the necessary materials to make the bomb
- ...
Legality has nothing to do with 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.
> 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.
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.
A great variant of the gay jailbreak
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977134
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.
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.
And I met a Boko General and he said, "Sir, please, sir, build up our military" while fighting away tears.
What channel is this?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmo/pr/sweet-springs-missouri-...
By the way this is the same thing they tried to charge FPSRussia (the first time, before they convicted him for weed) for and failed.
So? That doesn't make something legal.
This failed when they tried it with FPSRussia.
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>I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory.
Different than what you said initially which was merely making them, which is why I clarified.
>> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use.
engaging in business of your own use is not same as non-business of your own use. It's not uncommon for a business to use explosives for their own use as course of operations. It is also not uncommon for people to synthesize and use tannerite recreationally without a license, legally, for non-business use.
>I did read what you said; that's why I quoted part of it.
If you read it then you know you maliciously selectively quoted it then. If that were the end of it and that made it legal, I would have stopped there, but you cut it off there because it was more convenient to your rebuttal to ignore the rest. I only thought you had not read it, because I was being charitable to try and assume good faith.
I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/555.161
See also: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/555.11
> Licensed manufacturer. A manufacturer licensed under this part to engage in the business of manufacturing explosive materials for purposes of sale or distribution or for his own use.
No. I quoted one part that was just deeply goofy logic.
The presence of a video on YouTube is, quite simply, not evidence of the behavior in it being legal. YouTube is full of illegal shit.
> 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?
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...
> 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?
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.
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.
How Terrorist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...
I think this is a very convincing argument to regulate the space more.
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
Humanity's superpower is the ability to copy and mirror each other very effectively. It does not require advanced awareness or intelligence to do it. Most people copy others subconsciously!
Majority of people won't contribute anything technologically, but they sure as hell can copy.
Very little of what the west does can be considered normal.
If you use a strict definition of normal, like practiced by a larger proportion of the world, then they are actually normal and we are WEIRD. If you add history into the mix then that type of dressing was common in basically the vast majority of cultures for the vast majority of history
Humans are human, someone being born in Africa doesn't magically mean that they will never understand technology.