AI bots hallucinate software packages and devs download them
www.theregister.com
Simply look out for libraries imagined by ML and make them real, with actual malicious code. No wait, don't do that

Archive Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240330224149/https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

This is fascinating. I’ve certainly seen AI hallucinating things like imaginary functions in gdscript. Admittedly, it does it a lot more with gpt3 than with gpt4 on a subscription, which is consistent with what 3 vs 4 has access to, but I’m sure the problems apply in a lot of other use cases that might have not had the benefit of more recent documentation.

I suppose it’s not surprising that a number of larger entities have been falling prey to this, as they keep trying to inappropriately jam AI into their production lines where it’s incapable of doing the job. Pretty clever vulnerability to find, though.

Ultimately, this is probably a good thing for human coders, imo. The more LLMs demonstrate that they’re not effective without robust human intervention, the better.

  • towerful@programming.dev
    5·
    9 months ago

    I had a google summary telling me how to use a lodash (js object/array/things helper library) method that sounded like it probably would exist.
    It was named how lodash would likely name it, and was summarised to do what i needed.
    Except, lodash doesnt have that method. Had to use a couple methods.

    But that was eye opening for me.
    Similar to lawyers citing cases that dont exist.
    Saw a meme-ish post recently from an IBM presentation 30-40 years ago along the lines of “computers cannot be held accountable. So dont have them make decisions”.