These books were purchased by them before being destroyed in the scanning process. I fail to see the issue with this specific case. Lots of artists buy stuff and irreversibly modify it. Are we going to be angry now at people who glue their puzzles or use parts of books for scrapbooking? If these were unique works there would be an issue, but I don’t think that truly unique pieces would be in their target group, as the destructive scanning is all about cost cutting and unique works cost a lot of money that they wouldn’t just destroy.

The fact that they use it for model training and later sell access to that model’s work is the shady part that has a severe whiff of plagiarism to it.

As far as I remember, there was never an option for me to choose where I was born. I think the same counts for those Russian people you’re so quick to dismiss?

Isn’t this site proof that the internet doesn’t have to die as a whole? I mean, I agree with your sentiment, but I feel that this will mostly hit the middle to high traffic sites. The community based ones with organic discovery will remain OK I think. This might even evolve back to an early internet age of smaller hobbyist sites because there no longer is big money in the internet (apart from what google captures as “their” internet)

If I were to ask my Magic 8 Ball “Is the word ‘difinitely’ misspelled?” 100 times, it’s going to reply in the affirmative over 16% of the time.

This comparison makes no sense. Your example has a binary question. In that case, any system that replies correctly at even a rate of around 50% would be useless. However, the problem space in this scenario is way larger than 2 options and still way larger than 100 options. Being correct in even a small number of 100 attempts is still statistically significant.

The fact that an LLM is unable to reason and that it is based on statistics doesn’t change anything about this behavior. At the end of the day you get a tool that is able to point you to actual new information that you by yourself did not arrive at.

Imagine that you put a lot of effort in a better model specifically for vulnerability research and you get it up to a correctness rate of a mere 10%. I would gladly hire some programmers to sift through these reports and possibly find overlooked vulnerabilities.

This is literally the very first experiment in this use case, done by a single person on a model that wasn’t specifically designed for this. The fact that it is able to formulate a correct response at all in this situation impresses me.

It would be easy to criticize this if it were the endpoint and this was being advertised as a tool for vulnerability research, but as discussed at the end of the post, this “quick little test” shows both initial promising results and had the fortunate byproduct of actually revealing a new vulnerability. By no means is it implied that it is now ready for use in this field.

The issue with hallucinations is one that in my opinion is never going to be totally fixed. That is why I hate the use of AI as a final arbiter of truth, which is sadly how a lot of people use it (I’ll quickly ask ChatGPT) and companies advertise it. What it is good at however, is coming up with plausible ideas, and in this case having an indication for things to check in code can be a great tool to discover new stuff, as is literally the case for this security researcher finding a new vulnerability after auditing the module themselves.

I hate AI. Why?

• Because of its extreme energy consumption compared to what it achieves
• Because it is all in the hands of the worst companies on this planet
• Because capitalists are foaming at the mouth to use it to fuck over workers
• Because it is devaluing art and reducing it to another commodity to “produce”

However

I also took the time to read the original blog post, and it is a fascinating story.

The author starts out with using an existing vulnerability as a benchmark for ChatGPT testing. They describe how they took the code specific to the vulnerability and packaged it for ChatGPT, how they formatted the query and what their results were. In 100 runs only 8 correctly identify the targeted vulnerability, the rest are false positives or claim that there are no vulnerabilities in the given code.

Then they take their test a step further and increase the amount of code shared with ChatGPT so that it also includes stuff of the module that had nothing to do with the original vulnerability. As expected, this larger input decreases performance and also reduces the vulnerability detection rate for the targeted vulnerability. However, in those 100 runs, another vulnerability was described that wasn’t a false positive. An actual new vulnerability that the author didn’t know about was discovered. Again, the signal to noise ratio is very low, and one has to sift through a lot of wrong reports to get a realistic one, but this proved that it could be used as a useful tool for helping to detect vulnerabilities.

I highly recommend reading the blog post.

As much as I like to be critical about AI, it doesn’t help if we put our heads in the sand and act as if it never does something cool.

That’s the stupid part. Serious criminals will always find a way to encrypt their data. Any communication channel can be used for encrypted communication if you do the encryption part yourself (like with an agreed upon passphrase or something similar). The only people who are hit by this are the average users.

This makes me so mad.

Isn’t that worse though? They use your computing power but they still get the data :). At least with cloud apps you get the benefit of not having to run the app locally (this was the idea behind low powered chromebooks).

How come you have such strong feelings against Firefox?

Not trying to start a fight, just an honest question. Choosing to rather stop using the internet all together seems extreme for a browser that I use daily, but maybe I’m missing something in your use case.

“based on news like this”

I think you’re spot on there. Not saying that the BBC is untrustworthy, but there is always a bias in every news source. Especially when it comes to criticizing foreign policy versus local policy.

I am not disputing that it is not going well there. I’m just saying that similar issues are present in a lot of western countries. I am of course only talking about the subject of this article. If you look at how authoritarian the gouvernement is, stuff does get clearly worse in China compared to most western countries.

Don’t the amount of available jobs scale too?

I feel like this problem would be the same if China was a tenth the size, same goes for US and other countries. It’s a systemic issue, where the ratios of workers and jobs are wrong and unsocial.

While technically correct, they do have it in China itself, it’s a modified version called Douyin. It is more restricted, censored and tightly controlled.

I agree that it is a cyberweapon, but don’t think that it’s only used against foreigners, they use it just as much to observe and influence their own population.

Finally, I would like to point out that to a lesser extent this is also the case for a lot of USA owned social media and tech companies. Edward Snowden’s revelations for example indicate this. While the extent of government control and influence is much larger in China, I wouldn’t underestimate the influences of Meta, Google and Microsoft for example.

What are you trying to achieve here, “triggering” people? It just registers as infantile to me.

I think the issue is not wether it’s sentient or not, it’s how much agency you give it to control stuff.

Even before the AI craze this was an issue. Imagine if you were to create an automatic turret that kills living beings on sight, you would have to make sure you add a kill switch or you yourself wouldn’t be able to turn it off anymore without getting shot.

The scary part is that the more complex and adaptive these systems become, the more difficult it can be to stop them once they are in autonomous mode. I think large language models are just another step in that complexity.

An atomic bomb doesn’t pass a Turing test, but it’s a fucking scary thing nonetheless.

I think they were joking. As in actually submitting bugs (adding bugs to the code).

I can’t really pinpoint why, but I barfed a little after seeing that video.

I agreed with you up until your last paragraph: that is some serious exaggerating. Never did the original commenter say that the solution was to kill all Palestinians.

I don’t agree with their view that eradicating Hamas followed by a temporary occupation by Israël will magically help the Palestinian people, but reducing an opposing viewpoint to a literal Nazi isn’t going to help or convince anyone.

Haha as a Belgian this comment is hilarious. Like we’re all scrambling for ways to kill each other here without our poor guns.

The headline feels a bit alarmist to me. The article itself is a bit better and more nuanced, but still I feel they are putting way to much drama around this device while almost all these issues already exist as small slabs of electronics that we wear all the time. Combined with smartwatches, smartphones do almost all the spying that is described here and add some GPS tracking wherever you go.

This is not to say that this is not a big issue, merely that this issue is not related to this new device. And also I believe Apple is in fact the only big tech provider that actually tries to be somewhat privacy conscious (Google and Microsoft don’t give damn).

I’m glad you bring up the power imbalance. The “both sides have been doing horrible stuff” only works if both sides have equal footing, which they clearly do not. This does not negate the crimes commited by Hamas, but extremism doesn’t come from nowhere and Israël has a responsibility in that.