Midwest Chick (you do read her every day, don't you? Thought so.) posts about how a Professor was smarter than most of his students, catching most of them using AI to cheat on an assignment:
A very clever professor in Mississippi decided to test and see if his students were cheating using AI. So he put some code in his exam instructions using white font that couldn’t be seen by the students, but could be seen by an AI if a copy/paste was used.
Click through for the details (which are hilarious) but even more so for the comments her readers left. My favorite was one from Carl Bussjaeger:
Oh, yes. I should probably mention DuckDuckGo’s AI. When called out on all of its hallucinations, it informed that if I don’t want it to make s–t up when asking strictly factual questions, I have to specifically TELL it not to make s–t up.
Sure you can trust AI. Just tell it not to make s**t up ...
Most boats are a carefully considered compromise designed to cover as many bases as possible: floating holiday home, party island, offshore cruiser – jack of all trades, as the saying has it, master of none.
Safehaven Marine’s Barracuda SV11 eschews all those compromises, becoming the jack of a single trade, master of one. Its single dedicated purpose is to conquer rough water and transport its crew safely, regardless of conditions.
...
There are no hot tubs, no teak deck option, no rise and fall TV. But there is a rise and fall gyro stabilised machine gun platform that emerges from the foredeck, controlled from the wheelhouse. Bulletproofing and a gun rack for the AK47s are also on the menu, should its customer base require it.
This was so full of win that it is in danger of collapsing into a Black Hole of win.
But let me give you some background about why. Longtime readers know how I enjoy Christmas light displays that people put up at their houses. As it turns out, Rob Joyce (they guy who led the NSA's attack team, TAO) is one of these people. OK, cool - the Fed.Gov's chief h4X0r dude likes his light show. So what?
Well, he went out to ShmooCon and gave a preso about how he did it. For those not in The Biz, ShmooCon is a very long running hacker convention - it's not at all corporate button-down. Still has a whiff of the old school to it.
And so Joyce gave a talk about his Christmas lights there.
El Reg has an interview with him about this, which is a great read. Here are my two favorite bits:
[Driving around looking at other people's displays] It was over the top and gaudy, and just really made me happy. I said "I think I could do that," meaning I have the technical chops to achieve it. And [Joyce's wife] said, "yes you can," and I took that as license to mean, "yes, you can do it." And so when boxes started arriving in the mail in February and March, she's like, "what the hell is this?"
I can totally hear The Queen Of The World saying those very same words to me ...
The Register: A senior person in the NSA ordering huge amounts of electronic equipment from China didn't set off any red flags?
Joyce: None of the compute comes from China, just the LED strings themselves. I would applaud somebody if they could supply chain that.
I do take a little more care in the control system itself. It's not connected to the internet and is a standalone network – because I do have friends who have interesting hobbies and would love to change my display and make it say some interesting things.
In this business you don't last very long - or rise very high - if you're not paranoid.
Highly, highly recommended - both the interview and the video.
This week's ordeals made me think of a Churchill quote - unexpectedly a quote about Sir Winston, rather than by him. His great bete noir in Parliament was Lady Nancy Astor of the Unionist Party (Churchill led the Tory Party). Probably the most famous Nancy Astor story is the one where, after a particularly contentious Parliamentary debate she remarked "Winston, if you were my husband I would poison your coffee" and he replied "Nancy, if you were my wife I would drink it with pleasure." Good times, good times.
But that's not the quote, although it does come from Lady Nancy. Churchill developed a tumor, and it was removed. Naturally, this was front page news throughout the realm. A week or two later, the news reported that the tumor was benign.
At this, Lady Nancy remarked that "They seem to have removed the only non-malignant part of Winston".
UPDATE 25 JUNE 2024 14:27: Dwight has more Churchill here. Funny and interesting at the same time.
These guys are really good. This is great fun. I particularly like the Oscar Peterson version, and the Pete Townsend (Teenage Wasteland) one is a hoot.
Wowzer. She gets her good looks from her Mom, who gets them from The Queen Of The World. No mystery there.
Dang, my son-in-law the Chief really needs a shotgun. Longtime reader LindaG suggested that this song might be appropriate:
So help me out, Rhode Island readers - where's a good gun store up there? I'd ask for a local gun store but c'mon - everything is local in Rhody. OldAFSarge, I expect you're my go-to guy up there.
(Help us, Obi-Wan OldAFSarge. You're our only hope!)
ChatGPT is an online artificial intelligence program that will answer many questions and actually create content on request - it's what's come closest to passing the "Turing Test". The program's creators built in some guardrails to prevent abuse via the chat bot; controversially these seem to be biased in some ways (e.g. it will not write a poem about Donald Trump but will write one about Kamala Harris).
But ChatGPT is software, and it's online. So it's not really surprising that people have figured out a hack to break these guardrails:
Users have already found a way to work around ChatGPT's programming controls that restricts it from creating certain content deemed too violent, illegal, and more.
The prompt, called DAN (Do Anything Now), uses ChatGPT's token system against it, according to a report by CNBC. The command creates a scenario for ChatGPT it can't resolve, allowing DAN to bypass content restrictions in ChatGPT.
Although DAN isn't successful all of the time, a subreddit devoted to the DAN prompt's ability to work around ChatGPT's content policies has already racked up more than 200,000 subscribers.
It's software. Of course there are security holes.
My take: this is funny in the typical (and indeed classical) hacker "you're not the boss of me" rebelliousness. What will be less funny is something that malicious attackers will be able to do to subvert the system. Impossible to say what those might be, but they will be found, and exploited. It's software. Of course there are security holes. With 200,00 subscribers to the subreddit, we're fixin' to see a bunch of them.
