Technology

Back in ancient times when I was a system administrator we got a heads up that there be a new breed of Outlook worm coming soon to our timezone.

So we mailed the entire office that if you get mail that looks like this or that, do not open it, do not interact but delete it on sight.

Most of the office was all right, except pretty much entire sales and marketing departments including the bosses. Most of them had noOo idea what could have happened but one of them explained that they saw the warning but they were curious to see what the virus looks like.

People. What a bunch of bastards.

copilot should just be prompting the user for permission if it ever edits a file other than the one that is open. Im surprised that isnt already the case…?

That can't be done or they would be burying the "agentic AI" thing that has been the goal and marketing thing for the last years.

Independent actions by copilot on behalf of the user without the users knowledge is the entire point.

The number of people that click through to disable that prompt might surprise you.

Hell at least half of AI influences are trying to just run models blind with full file permissions.

Considering people's Word formatting skills, a random blank page is not suspicious

I might be misinterpreting parody, but you can most definitely run AI tooling on Linux. And it has most of the same vulnerabilities, if not additional/different ones.

if the instruction is messy fuzzy human language to a system that was not coded instruction by instruction but got generated and trained then there never is a way to differentiate instructions from data if i'm not mistaken

I just can't anymore. Isn't that like, the basic thing any program does? Who runs these companies?

Little Bobby Tables strikes again.

That’s also not the only way. Basic governance also works. Why does copilot have so many permissions?

I have heard in the past that it's not possible to fully control AI. Like literally, the people developing and running the AI cannot fully control its behavior. I did a quick search to see if I could find more info and found this link on the first page of results: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1032090

I think that we're going to continue seeing unwanted behavior from AI.

It's a text completion model/glorified Markov chain. Of course it can't input sanitise, it was never meant to do this to begin with.

The tool calling integrations that let it do more are basically making it add a markdown code block in JSON format into the user message, where the middleware intercepts it.

The input and "instructions" are the same thing from its perspective. There's nothing special that differentiates the two. The user input text, so it will output text, following the most likely sequence from its training.

I'm trying to figure where this was supposed to go. Or I fail to understand some insider joke.

Material science simulations, Weather and climate modeling, Protein and genetic analysis and modeling, Video games and CGI, Logistics and scheduling

That lock is about to find out

The article is about AI worms. And the thumb is what an AI image generator thought, AI worms could look like.

Yeah, Same here honestly. I’m not using micro slop office anytime soon