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AI solves every river crossing puzzle, we can go home now [content warning: botshit] (gemini.google.com)

submitted 6 days ago by diz@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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I think this summarizes in one conversation what is so fucking irritating about this thing: I am supposed to believe that it wrote that code.

No siree, no RAG, no trickery with training a model to transform the code while maintaining identical expression graph, it just goes from word-salading all over the place on a natural language task, to outputting 100 lines of coherent code.

Although that does suggest a new dunk on computer touchers, of the AI enthusiast kind, you can point at that and say that coding clearly does not require any logical reasoning.

(Also, as usual with AI it is not always that good. sometimes it fucks up the code, too).

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[–] diz@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (14 children)

Other funny thing: it only became a fully automatic plagiarism machine when it claimed that it wrote the code (referring to itself by name which is a dead giveaway that the system prompt makes it do that).

I wonder if code is where they will ultimately get nailed to the wall for willful copyright infringement. Code is too brittle for their standard approach, "we sort of blurred a lot of works together so its ours now, transformative use, fuck you, prove that you don't just blur other people's work together, huh?".

But also for a piece of code, you can very easily test if the code has the same "meaning" - you can implement a parser that converts code to an expression graph, and then compare that. Which makes it far easier to output code that is functionally identical to the code they are plagiarizing, but looks very different.

But also I estimate approximately 0% probability that the assholes working on that wouldn't have banter between themselves about copyright laundering.

edit: Another thing is that since it can have no own conception of what "correct" behavior is for a piece of code being plagiarized, it would also plagiarize all the security exploits.

This hasn't been a big problem for the industry, because only short snippets were being cut and pasted (how to make some stupid API call, etc), but with generative AI whole implementations are going to get plagiarized wholesale.

Unlike any other work, code comes with its own built in, essentially irremovable "watermark" in the form of security exploits. In several thousands lines of code, there would be enough "watermark" for identification.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 2 points 5 days ago (8 children)

I'd say that incredibly unlikely unless an LLM suddenly blurts out Tesla's entire self-driving codebase.

The code itself is probably among the least behind-a-moat things in software development, that's why so many big players are fine with open sourcing their stuff.

[–] diz@awful.systems 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (7 children)

Pre-LLM, I had to sit through one or two annual videos to the sense of “dont cut and paste from open source, better yet don’t even look at GPLd code you arent working on” and had to do a click test with questions like “is it ok if you rename all the variables yes no”. Ohh and I had to run a scanning tool as part of the release process.

I don’t think its the FSD they would worry about, but GPL especially v3. Nobody gives a shit if it steals some leetcode snippet, or cuts and pastes some calls to a stupid API.

But if you have a “coding agent” just replicating GPL code wholesale, thousands and thousands of lines, it would be very obvious. And not all companies ship shitcode. Apple is a premium product and ages old patched CVEs from open source cropping up in there wouldn’t be exactly premium.

[–] HedyL@awful.systems 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

And, after the end of the AI boom, do we really know what wealthy investors are going to do with the money they cannot throw at startups anymore? Can we be sure they won't be using it to fund lawsuits over alleged copyright infringements instead?

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Fund copyright infringement lawsuits against the people they had been bankrolling the last few years? Sure, if the ROI is there, but I'm guessing they'll likely move on to then next trendy sounding thing, like a quantum remote diddling stablecoin or whatevertheshit.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Either that, or put their money into defence and make a quick killing off of all the war breaking out.

[–] HedyL@awful.systems 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

And there might be new "vulture funds" that deliberately buy failing software companies simply because they hold some copyright that might be exploitable. If there are convincing legal reasons why this likely won't fly, fine. Otherwise I wouldn't rely on the argument that "this is a theoretical possibility, but who would ever do such a thing?"

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 3 points 5 days ago

Exploiting software copyright could be profitable, but to my knowledge its an unproven method. At this moment, they're probably eyeing the fact that defense spending is ballooning worldwide and thinking "there's some easy money to made".

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