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Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

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Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#101

Post by JoshTriplett »

ryandrake wrote: post #81
terracatta wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will do better next time.

Great that you are open to feedback! I wish every blogger could hear and internalize this but I'm just a lowly HN poster with no reach, so I'll just piss into the wind here: You're probably a really good writer, and when you are a good writer, people want to hear your authentic voice. When an author uses AI, even "just a little to clean things up" it taints the whole piece. It's like they farted in the room. Everyone…

Seconding this. Your voice has value. Every time, every time, I've seen someone say "I use an LLM to make my writing better" and they post what it looked like before or other samples of their non-LLM writing, the non-LLM writing is always what I'd prefer. Without fail.

People talk about using it because they don't think their English is good enough, and then it turns out their English is fine and they just weren't confident in it. People talk about using it to make their writing "better", and their original made their point better and more concisely. And their original tends to be more memorable, as well, perhaps because it isn't homogenized.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#102

Post by benregenspan »

deaux wrote: post #84
beepbooptheory wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is surely no difficulty, but can you provide an example of what you mean? Just because I don't see it here. Or at least like, if I read a blog from some saas company pre-LLM era, I'd expect it to sound like this. I get the call for "effort" but recently this feels like its being used to critique the thing without engaging. HN has a policy about not complaining about the website itself when someone posts some co…

It's incredibly bad on this article. It stands out more because it's so wrong and the content itself could actually be interesting. Normally anything with this level of slop wouldn't even be worth reading if it wasn't slop. But let me help you see the light. I'm on mobile so forgive my lack of proper formatting. -- Because it’s not just that agents can be dangerous once they’re installed. The ecosystem that distribut…

> being the type of slurry that pre-AI was easily avoided by staying off of LinkedIn

This is why I'm rarely fully confident when judging whether or not something was written by AI. The "It's not this. It's that" pattern is not an emergent property of LLM writing, it's straight from the training data.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#103

Post by troyvit »

deanc wrote: post #49

It's absolute negligence for anyone to be installing anything at this point in this space. There is no oversight, hardly anyone looking at what's published, no automated scanning and there is no security model in place that works that isn't vulnerable to prompt injection. We need to go back to the drawing board. You might as well just run curl https://example.com/script.sh | sudo bash at this point.

> You might as well just run curl https://example.com/script.sh | sudo bash at this point.

Hey I ran this command and after I gave it my root password nothing happened. WTH man? /s

Point being, yeah, it's a little bit like fire. It seems really cool when you have a nice glowing coal nestled in a fire pit, but people have just started learning what happens when they pick it up with their bare hands or let it out of its containment.

Short-term a lot of nefarious people are going to extract a lot of wealth from naive people. Long term? To me it is another nail in the coffin of general computing:

> The answer is not to stop building agents. The answer is to build the missing trust layer around them. Skills need provenance. Execution needs mediation.

Guess who is going to build those trust layers? The very same orgs that control so much of our lives already. Google gems are already non-transportable to other people in enterprise accounts, and the reasons are the same as above: security. However they also can't be shared outside the Gemini context, which just means more lock-in.

So in the end, instead of teaching our kids how to use fire and showing them the burns we got in learning, we're going teach them to fear it and only let a select few hold the coals and decide what we can do with them.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#104

Post by beepbooptheory »

deaux wrote: post #84
beepbooptheory wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is surely no difficulty, but can you provide an example of what you mean? Just because I don't see it here. Or at least like, if I read a blog from some saas company pre-LLM era, I'd expect it to sound like this. I get the call for "effort" but recently this feels like its being used to critique the thing without engaging. HN has a policy about not complaining about the website itself when someone posts some co…

It's incredibly bad on this article. It stands out more because it's so wrong and the content itself could actually be interesting. Normally anything with this level of slop wouldn't even be worth reading if it wasn't slop. But let me help you see the light. I'm on mobile so forgive my lack of proper formatting. -- Because it’s not just that agents can be dangerous once they’re installed. The ecosystem that distribut…

I guess I just dont get the mode everyone is in where they got the editor hats on all the time. You can go back in time on that blog 10+ years and its all the same kind of dry, style guided, corporate speak to me, with maybe different characteristics. But still all active voice, lots of redundancy and emphasis. They are just dumb-ok blogs! I never thought it was "good," but I never put attention on it like I was reading Nabakov or something. I get we can all be hermeneuts now and decipher the true AI-ness of the given text, but isn't there time and place and all that?

I guess I too would be exhausted if I hung on every sentence construction like that of every corporate blog post I come across. But also, I guess I am a barely literate slop enjoyer, so grain of salt and all that.

Also: as someone who doesn't use the AI like this, how can it become beyond the run of the mill in slop? Like what happened to make it particularly bad? For something so flattening otherwise, that's kinda interesting right?

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#105

Post by ffsm8 »

rustyhancock wrote: post #99
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suspicion is that the problem here is pretty simple: people publishing articles that contain these kinds of LLM-ass LLMisms don't mind and don't notice them. I spotted this recently on Reddit. There are tons of very obviously bot-generated or LLM-written posts, but there are also always clearly real people in the comments who just don't realize that they're responding to a bot.

I think it's because LLMs are very good at tuning into the what the user wants the text to look like. But if you're outside that and looking in the text usually screams AI. I see this all the time with job applications even those that think they "rewrote it all". You are tempted to think the LLMs suggestion is acceptable far more than you would have produced it yourself. It reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode Camille…

People are way worse at detecting LLM written short form content (like comments, blogs, articles etc) then they believe themselves to be...

With CVs/job applications? I guarantee you, if you'd actually do a real blind trial, you'd be wrong so often that you'd be embarrassed.

It does become detectable over time, as you get to know their own writing style etc, but it's bonkas people still think they're able to make these detections on first contact. The only reason you can hold that opinion is because you're never notified of the countless false positives and false negatives you've had.

There is a reason why the LLMs keep doing the same linguistic phrases like it's not x, it's y and numbered lists with Emojis etc... and that's because people have been doing that forever.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#106

Post by jihadjihad »

mattstir wrote: post #9

This just seems like the logical consequence of the chosen system to be honest. "Skills" as a concept are much too broad and much too free-form to have any chance of being secure. Security has also been obviously secondary in the OpenClaw saga so far, with users just giving it full permissions to their entire machine and hoping for the best. Hopefully some of this will rekindle ideas that are decades old at this poin…

> Security has also been obviously secondary in the OpenClaw saga so far

s/OpenClaw/LLM/g

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#107

Post by seemaze »

ryandrake wrote: post #81
terracatta wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will do better next time.

Great that you are open to feedback! I wish every blogger could hear and internalize this but I'm just a lowly HN poster with no reach, so I'll just piss into the wind here: You're probably a really good writer, and when you are a good writer, people want to hear your authentic voice. When an author uses AI, even "just a little to clean things up" it taints the whole piece. It's like they farted in the room. Everyone…

I'm particularly fond of your fart analogy. It successfully captures the current AI zeitgeist for me.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#108

Post by oasisbob »

benregenspan wrote: post #102
deaux wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly bad on this article. It stands out more because it's so wrong and the content itself could actually be interesting. Normally anything with this level of slop wouldn't even be worth reading if it wasn't slop. But let me help you see the light. I'm on mobile so forgive my lack of proper formatting. -- Because it’s not just that agents can be dangerous once they’re installed. The ecosystem that distribut…

> being the type of slurry that pre-AI was easily avoided by staying off of LinkedIn This is why I'm rarely fully confident when judging whether or not something was written by AI. The "It's not this. It's that" pattern is not an emergent property of LLM writing, it's straight from the training data.

I don't agree. I have two theories about these overused patterns, because they're way over represented

One, they're rhetorical devices popular in oral speech, and are being picked up from transcripts and commercial sources eg, television ads or political talking head shows.

Two, they're popular with reviewers while models are going through post training. Either because they help paper over logical gaps, or provide a stylistic gloss which feels professional in small doses.

There is no way these patterns are in normal written English in the training corpus in the same proportion as they're being output.

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#109

Post by dspillett »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #54
danabramov wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your parent that the AI writing style is incredibly frustrating. Is there a difficulty with making a pass, reading every sentence of what was written, and then rewriting in your own words when you see AI cliches? It makes it difficult to trust the substance when the lack of effort in form is evident.

My suspicion is that the problem here is pretty simple: people publishing articles that contain these kinds of LLM-ass LLMisms don't mind and don't notice them. I spotted this recently on Reddit. There are tons of very obviously bot-generated or LLM-written posts, but there are also always clearly real people in the comments who just don't realize that they're responding to a bot.

> people publishing articles that contain these kinds of LLM-ass LLMisms don't mind and don't notice them

That certainly seems to be the case, as demonstrated by the fact that they post them. It is also safe to assume that those who fairly directly use LLM output themselves are not going to be overly bothered by the style being present in posts by others.

> but there are also always clearly real people in the comments who just don't realize that they're responding to a bot

Or perhaps many think they might be responding to someone who has just used an LLM to reword the post. Or translate it from their first language if that is not the common language of the forum in question.

TBH I don't bother (if I don't care enough to make the effort of writing something myself, then I don't care enough to have it written at all) but I try to have a little understanding for those who have problems writing (particularly those not writing in a language they are fluent in).

Re: Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware

#110

Post by majormajor »

ffsm8 wrote: post #105
rustyhancock wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because LLMs are very good at tuning into the what the user wants the text to look like. But if you're outside that and looking in the text usually screams AI. I see this all the time with job applications even those that think they "rewrote it all". You are tempted to think the LLMs suggestion is acceptable far more than you would have produced it yourself. It reminds me of the Red Dwarf episode Camille…

People are way worse at detecting LLM written short form content (like comments, blogs, articles etc) then they believe themselves to be... With CVs/job applications? I guarantee you, if you'd actually do a real blind trial, you'd be wrong so often that you'd be embarrassed. It does become detectable over time, as you get to know their own writing style etc, but it's bonkas people still think they're able to make the…

> There is a reason why the LLMs keep doing the same linguistic phrases like it's not x, it's y and numbered lists with Emojis etc... and that's because people have been doing that forever.

They've been doing some of these patterns for a while in certain places.

We spent the first couple decades of the 2000s to train ever "business leader" to speak LinkedIn/PowerPoint-ese. But a lot of people laughed at it when it popped up outside of LinkedIn.

But the people training the models thought certain "thought leader" styles were good so they have now pushed it much further and wider than ever before.

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