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OpenAI is good at unminifying code

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Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#101

Post by Max-q »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #23

JS minification is fairly mechanical and comparably simple, so the inversion should be relatively easy. It would be of course tedious enough to be manually done in general, but transformations themselves are fairly limited so it is possible to read them only with some notes to track mangled identifiers. A more general unminification or unobfuscation still seems to be an open problem. I wrote handful of programs that…

Converting a picture from color to black and white is a fairly simple task. Getting back the original in color is not easy. This is if course due to data lost in the process.

Minification works in the same way. A lot of information needed for understanding the code is lost. Getting back that information can be a very demanding task.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#102

Post by poikroequ »

DonHopkins wrote: post #55
poikroequ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

Using an LLM (or any technique) to decompile proprietary code is not clean room design. Declaring the results "open source" is deception and theft, which undermines the free open source software movement.

Only if you use the decompiled code. But if one team uses decompiled code to write up a spec, then another team writes an implementation based on that spec, then that could be considered clean room design. In this case, the decompiler would merely be a tool for reverse engineering.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#104

Post by lifthrasiir »

nutanc wrote: post #98

Had tweeted about this sometime back. Found a component which was open source earlier and then removed and only minfied JS was provided. Give the JS to Claude and get the original component back. It even gave good class names to the component and function names. Actually this opens up a bigger question. What if I like an open source project but don't like its license. I can just prompt AI by giving it the open source…

Almost likely you would be found guilty because the intent matters. It is easy to check that the generated code is much similar to the original code, and you surely had a reason to bypass the original license. The exact legal reasoning would vary but any reasonable laywer would recommend you to do not.

In the historic Google v. Oracle suit, the only actual code that was claimed to be copied was a trivial `rangeCheck` function, but Google's intent and other circumstances like the identical code structure and documentation made it much more complicated, and the final decision completely bypassed the copyrightability of APIs possibly for this reason.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#106

Post by lifthrasiir »

Max-q wrote: post #101
lifthrasiir wrote: post #23

JS minification is fairly mechanical and comparably simple, so the inversion should be relatively easy. It would be of course tedious enough to be manually done in general, but transformations themselves are fairly limited so it is possible to read them only with some notes to track mangled identifiers. A more general unminification or unobfuscation still seems to be an open problem. I wrote handful of programs that…

Converting a picture from color to black and white is a fairly simple task. Getting back the original in color is not easy. This is if course due to data lost in the process. Minification works in the same way. A lot of information needed for understanding the code is lost. Getting back that information can be a very demanding task.

But it is not much different from reading through badly documented codes without any comments or meaningful names. In fact, many codes to be minified are not that bad and thus it is often possible to infer the original code just from its structure. It is still not a trivial task, but I think my comment never implied that.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#107

Post by lifthrasiir »

poikroequ wrote: post #47
lifthrasiir wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mere decompilation or general reverse engineering should be fine in many if not most jurisdictions [1]. But it is a whole different matter to make use of any results from doing so. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reverse_engineering

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

It is true that at least some jurisdictions do also explicitly allow for reverse engineering to achieve interoperability, but I don't know if such provision is widespread.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#108

Post by SiempreViernes »

baq wrote: post #63
xanderlewis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not only their core strength — it’s what transformers were designed to do and, arguably, it’s all they can do. Any other supposed ability to reason or even retain knowledge (rather than simply regurgitate text without ‘understanding’ its intended meaning) is just a side effect of this superhuman ability.

> it’s all they can do this overlooks how they do it. we don't really know. it might be logical reasoning, it might be a very efficient content addressable human-knowledge-in-a-blob-of-numbers lookup table... it doesn't matter if they work, which they do, sometimes scarily well. dismissing their abilities because they 'don't reason' is missing the forest for the trees in that they'd be capable of reasoning if they we…

Dismissing claims that LLMs "reason" because these machines perform no actions similar to reasoning seems pretty motivated. And I don't think "blindly take input from a reasoning capable system" counts as reasoning.

Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code

#109

Post by mewpmewp2 »

GaggiX wrote: post #46
smusamashah wrote: post #21

LLMS are trained to predict next text. But examples like these look like they have also 'learned patterns'. If rot13 is applied on this minified code, will LLM still find meaning in it? if it still could, its more than just next tokens. Need to try it. edit: chatgpt found out that its rot13 and couldn't explain the code directly without deobfuscating it first.

I asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet a question in Italian in rot13 and it replied in Italian in rot13, there are a few typos but it's perfectly understandable.

I tried with GPT-4o and it also responded in rot13, the response was on topic, but quite non-sensical, like GPT-2 or lower level.

However I can confirm that Claude was able to identify that it's rot13 and also respond properly.

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