friendly reminder that the bots are spying on you

  • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    I don’t think this is Gemini trying to run some of its own code to save facts about the user and whoops displaying the code it was trying to run to the user rather than running it or anything like that. That’s not how software works, and not how LLMs work.

    More likely somewhere in Gemini’s training data, there’s one or more code examples (specifically Python code examples, by the looks of it) that have something to do with the user’s prompt. The relationship between Python code examples and the user’s prompt may well be extremely nonobvious, but there’d have to be something about the prompt that made Gemini hallucinate that.

    Source: Am software engineer. Though I don’t have any hands-on experience with generative AI to speak of. I do think generative AI is a bullshit hype bubble, though.

    • ebolapie@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 hours ago

      This probably is not actually Gemini attempting to run code. It’s not staged though, this came out of left field. I was bitching at it about the number of Nazis on Twitter and bullying it for calling Elon musk a free speech absolutist. Then I nonsequitured into the bit about watermelon.

      • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Nice! Thanks for clarifying that. It definitely puts some of the hypotheses to rest. I imagine some of the people saying it was staged were just too swept up in the AI bubble hype to admit to themselves or others that their Lord and Savior Generative AI could be so dumb as to do that sort of thing without a human faking it.

        • ebolapie@lemmy.worldOP
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          3 hours ago

          Meh, I think it’s a good instinct. The OP always lies until proven otherwise. I probably should have clarified in the post itself. I just didn’t expect so much engagement.

    • Takumidesh@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      Another thing to consider is that it’s really easy to manipulate these types of screenshots by just telling the AI to respond to your prompt in a certain way.

      You can just say ‘respond to my next sentence with python code saving my info’ and it will do it.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        Or just inspect element, no need to reinvent the wheel when you can modify anything you see on the web

      • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        Sure, but LLMs are also sufficiently prone to spontaneously doing weird stuff like that that it’s very believable that it’s authentic/organic. And there’s definitely Python code in Gemini’s training data.

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zone
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      14 hours ago

      i mean, kinda… that’s how tools work: tools aren’t anything particularly special; they’re just the model replying in a way that the code running the model knows to ingest and perform an action with, rather than just replying to the user… so if the model for whatever reason messed that up, it could probably output tool calls

      … and the “common sense” is for sure implemented with tools-like stuff