#coding assistance

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Humans are not perfectly vigilant

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

These "hallucinations" are a stubbornly persistent feature of large language models, because these models only give the illusion of understanding; in reality, they are just sophisticated forms of autocomplete, drawing on huge databases to make shrewd (but reliably fallible) guesses about which word comes next:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Guessing the next word without understanding the meaning of the resulting sentence makes unsupervised LLMs unsuitable for high-stakes tasks. The whole AI bubble is based on convincing investors that one or more of the following is true:

There are low-stakes, high-value tasks that will recoup the massive costs of AI training and operation;

There are high-stakes, high-value tasks that can be made cheaper by adding an AI to a human operator;

Adding more training data to an AI will make it stop hallucinating, so that it can take over high-stakes, high-value tasks without a "human in the loop."

These are dubious propositions. There's a universe of low-stakes, low-value tasks – political disinformation, spam, fraud, academic cheating, nonconsensual porn, dialog for video-game NPCs – but none of them seem likely to generate enough revenue for AI companies to justify the billions spent on models, nor the trillions in valuation attributed to AI companies:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

The proposition that increasing training data will decrease hallucinations is hotly contested among AI practitioners. I confess that I don't know enough about AI to evaluate opposing sides' claims, but even if you stipulate that adding lots of human-generated training data will make the software a better guesser, there's a serious problem. All those low-value, low-stakes applications are flooding the internet with botshit. After all, the one thing AI is unarguably very good at is producing bullshit at scale. As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshittibottification

This means that adding another order of magnitude more training data to AI won't just add massive computational expense – the data will be many orders of magnitude more expensive to acquire, even without factoring in the additional liability arising from new legal theories about scraping:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

That leaves us with "humans in the loop" – the idea that an AI's business model is selling software to businesses that will pair it with human operators who will closely scrutinize the code's guesses. There's a version of this that sounds plausible – the one in which the human operator is in charge, and the AI acts as an eternally vigilant "sanity check" on the human's activities.

For example, my car has a system that notices when I activate my blinker while there's another car in my blind-spot. I'm pretty consistent about checking my blind spot, but I'm also a fallible human and there've been a couple times where the alert saved me from making a potentially dangerous maneuver. As disciplined as I am, I'm also sometimes forgetful about turning off lights, or waking up in time for work, or remembering someone's phone number (or birthday). I like having an automated system that does the robotically perfect trick of never forgetting something important.

There's a name for this in automation circles: a "centaur." I'm the human head, and I've fused with a powerful robot body that supports me, doing things that humans are innately bad at.

That's the good kind of automation, and we all benefit from it. But it only takes a small twist to turn this good automation into a nightmare. I'm speaking here of the reverse-centaur: automation in which the computer is in charge, bossing a human around so it can get its job done. Think of Amazon warehouse workers, who wear haptic bracelets and are continuously observed by AI cameras as autonomous shelves shuttle in front of them and demand that they pick and pack items at a pace that destroys their bodies and drives them mad:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

Automation centaurs are great: they relieve humans of drudgework and let them focus on the creative and satisfying parts of their jobs. That's how AI-assisted coding is pitched: rather than looking up tricky syntax and other tedious programming tasks, an AI "co-pilot" is billed as freeing up its human "pilot" to focus on the creative puzzle-solving that makes coding so satisfying.

But an hallucinating AI is a terrible co-pilot. It's just good enough to get the job done much of the time, but it also sneakily inserts booby-traps that are statistically guaranteed to look as plausible as the good code (that's what a next-word-guessing program does: guesses the statistically most likely word).

This turns AI-"assisted" coders into reverse centaurs. The AI can churn out code at superhuman speed, and you, the human in the loop, must maintain perfect vigilance and attention as you review that code, spotting the cleverly disguised hooks for malicious code that the AI can't be prevented from inserting into its code. As "Lena" writes, "code review [is] difficult relative to writing new code":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

Why is that? "Passively reading someone else's code just doesn't engage my brain in the same way. It's harder to do properly":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773780355708764665

There's a name for this phenomenon: "automation blindness." Humans are just not equipped for eternal vigilance. We get good at spotting patterns that occur frequently – so good that we miss the anomalies. That's why TSA agents are so good at spotting harmless shampoo bottles on X-rays, even as they miss nearly every gun and bomb that a red team smuggles through their checkpoints:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

"Lena"'s thread points out that this is as true for AI-assisted driving as it is for AI-assisted coding: "self-driving cars replace the experience of driving with the experience of being a driving instructor":

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773841546753831283

In other words, they turn you into a reverse-centaur. Whereas my blind-spot double-checking robot allows me to make maneuvers at human speed and points out the things I've missed, a "supervised" self-driving car makes maneuvers at a computer's frantic pace, and demands that its human supervisor tirelessly and perfectly assesses each of those maneuvers. No wonder Cruise's murderous "self-driving" taxis replaced each low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged technical robot supervisors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

AI radiology programs are said to be able to spot cancerous masses that human radiologists miss. A centaur-based AI-assisted radiology program would keep the same number of radiologists in the field, but they would get less done: every time they assessed an X-ray, the AI would give them a second opinion. If the human and the AI disagreed, the human would go back and re-assess the X-ray. We'd get better radiology, at a higher price (the price of the AI software, plus the additional hours the radiologist would work).

But back to making the AI bubble pay off: for AI to pay off, the human in the loop has to reduce the costs of the business buying an AI. No one who invests in an AI company believes that their returns will come from business customers to agree to increase their costs. The AI can't do your job, but the AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI anyway – that pitch is the most successful form of AI disinformation in the world.

An AI that "hallucinates" bad advice to fliers can't replace human customer service reps, but airlines are firing reps and replacing them with chatbots:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know

An AI that "hallucinates" bad legal advice to New Yorkers can't replace city services, but Mayor Adams still tells New Yorkers to get their legal advice from his chatbots:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/03/nycs-government-chatbot-is-lying-about-city-laws-and-regulations/

The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software – everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur – they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.

But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.

Reverse centaurism is brutal. That's not news: Charlie Chaplin documented the problems of reverse centaurs nearly 100 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

As ever, the problem with a gadget isn't what it does: it's who it does it for and who it does it to. There are plenty of benefits from being a centaur – lots of ways that automation can help workers. But the only path to AI profitability lies in reverse centaurs, automation that turns the human in the loop into the crumple-zone for a robot:

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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Jorge Royan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munich_-_Two_boys_playing_in_a_park_-_7328.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[blocksifybuzz]

Claude 2: The Ethical AI Chatbot Revolutionizing Conversations

In the vast and ever-evolving realm of artificial intelligence, where countless chatbots vie for attention, Claude 2 stands out as a beacon of ethical and advanced conversational capabilities. Developed by the renowned Anthropic AI, this isn’t merely another name lost in the sea of AI models. Instead, it’s both a game-changer and a revolution in the making, promising to redefine the very…

[manmishra]

🚀 Exciting news! Google has launched Gemini 2.0 and AI Mode, transforming how we search. Get ready for faster, smarter responses to complex queries! Explore the future of AI in search today! #GoogleAI #Gemini2 #AIMode #SearchInnovation

[programingassignmenthelp]

Coding Assignment Help

Facing coding assignment challenges? Our coding assignment help is your remedy. Our expert programmers provide tailored guidance, unraveling complex concepts and ensuring your success. Be it Python, Java, or any language, we're here to streamline your coding tasks. Bid farewell to coding stress and welcome elevated performance. Let us enhance your coding journey now.

[lycorogue]

Inquiry for the internet collective.

I have a blog via blogger dot com. I include images on said blog. I very VERY vaguely dabble in html coding to adjust a few things in the formatting. I would love to include alt text or some other image describer so that my blog can be more accessible to those with screen readers or lower connection speeds.

Sample coding for an image in my blog posts looks like this (minus the space between the angle brackets):

< table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" > < tbody > < tr > < td style="text-align:center;" > < a href="[image location url.png]" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" > < img border="0" data-original-height="398" data-original-width="398" height="320" src="[same image location url as before.png]" width="320" / > < /a > < /td > < /tr > < tr > < td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[image caption] < /td > < /tr > < /tbody > < /table >

My Google Fu has failed me, and I cannot sort out any way to code in the alt text. I've tried using the normal html coding I've found - including the code alt="[image description]" within the < img > code - but it doesn't actually show up when I publish my blog.

Does anyone know how I can get alt text to work? Or can you suggest an alternative option?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

[rocktartz]

I made this instead of homework.

Smol Peri vs Big Peri

Enjoy a song I found that reminds me of them (In a completely platonic way mind you)

I find the lyrics funny. I picture it from ARTs perspective in Artificial Condition when MB just showed up and invited itself in.

It was all lonely on a cargo haul. It also really enjoys taking care of people. And MB is a person. (Despite its protests) And now MB can accompany it wherever it goes.

Its even funnier if you change the lyric “And when I looked the moon had turned to Gold”, To —“Pink”

I also just love old 60’s music paired with ART I cant explain it. It just feels fitting.

Also! Here is my reference

[tangramkey]

i love my Basketbot Portal AU

[viktorarcanedeservesbetter]

Imagine being Singed though, knowing Viktor? All you wanna do if find a cure for death (lmao right) and bring your daughter back to life, then one day this little boat enters the cave you keep your mutant salamander in, and a little boy with a cane finds it, offers to help because its dying and you’re like hell yeah an apprentice I’m good with kids.

Then this kid doesn’t get that the salamander ain’t a pet, it’s drugs/tester for drugs, and leaves angrily (bro thought you were chill) and you never see him again though you do hear things about him being a co-creator of literal magic technology and you’re probably like damn that’s cool.

Then about twenty years after you first met he comes back to your lab, looking sick af (literally) and is like I totally get why you were torturing that pink lizard, do you have a solution that will keep me from dying? And you’re like yep sure do, he’s some modified heroin-crack I made from the lizard for you, people are gonna hate you though. And he only is like “Jayce will understand” and you’re like fuck he’s repressed and gay, whatever

Then a few months (idk) later you find out he survived an explosion, got fused with the thing you wanted to see (👀) now the leader of a cult, has a hivemind, can heal people and see memories and thoughts, and he’s trying to reverse the process on your wolfman, once again forgets the lesson you tried teaching him (bro, the mutation must survive!) even though you just showed him that very private memory of your dead daughter. And refuses the wolfman blood.

So you’re like, fuck it, stops the process anyways on the wolfman, his ex boyfriend shoots him in the chest, he cocoons himself in a weird sphere, his boyfriend rejects him again, then he’s like fine whatever use the blood. Then he ascends to godhood, you use leftover parts to bring your daughter back to life, and later find out that while in the hivemind his on-again off-again boyfriend told him they were soulmates, and they blipped out of existence.

It’s like what if the kid you babysat one time came back when they were an adult with like, ten college degrees and a co-ceo of apple, bought your own brand of weed, and then half a year later became Jesus.

[chaoticneutralgood2627]

Completely off topic from politics, can anyone help me find a book title?

I grew up in the 2000's, it was in my local library. Was like a spy, codes-and-cyphers book adjacent thing. Big book, size of a child's torso (maybe around 12-14 inches? Child me wasn't good at sizing, so I'm very much guessing). Had a red decoder thingy on the front cover that you could remove and use in the book. There was an Egypt one similar.

[kitramune]

Some tired good boys

[oneaichat]

How Authors Can Use AI to Improve Their Writing Style

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Conclusion

By integrating AI into their writing process, authors can enhance their style, improve efficiency, and foster creativity. While AI should not replace human intuition, it serves as a valuable assistant, enabling writers to produce polished and impactful content effortlessly.

[daryfromthefuture]

HAPPY BTTF DAY ⚡🎉

excuse the potato quality, the og image turned out to be way too big and i had to compress lmao-

super happy to be part of this beautiful fandom, i love all of you so much <33

[trashrattt]

Welcome to the internet

[namaeekaki]

✨️🌈MISS GOLDEN WEEK BIRTHDAAY! 🎨🖌️

Buggy can handle a bit more of debt. It's for a good cause. the happiness of his daughter art assistant

[babymorte]

people expect you to stay around while they always put you last

[damianwaynerocks]

damian wayne canonically reads naruto now. do we think he is an obito defender or an anti.