Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

kolide.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–129 of 129 posts

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#121

Post by hospitalJail »

lucubratory wrote: post #86
hospitalJail wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stable Diffusion doesnt make art, it makes photos. We can deem them art. Its denoising software.

Ooh, this is a rare one! A comment directly noting the similarities between AI art with photography, but insisting both aren't art. You're in very historical company: https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/

>Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it.”

That has nothing to do with the technology, that has everything to do with the quality.

Is it art if I take a picture with the cap on? No. Is it art if I take a picture of a tan colored wall? No.

Is it art if I set up something beautiful and take a picture. Its closer to art than the previous few examples.

If I write a prompt that says: "a green bedroom with art work on the walls", to be inspired, that still isnt trying to be art.

Basically, have higher standards.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#122

Post by nathan_compton »

pixl97 wrote: post #88
nathan_compton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used it extensively . GPT4 is great, but it is not intelligent. I think its really weird and also totally understandable that people think it is.

Eh, please comprehensively define intelligent... I have a feeling that this may explain a lot about your answer.

Well, one clear thing about GPT4 that isn't intelligent is that it doesn't learn in situ. Knowledge has to be added to it via an external process. The prompt does allow it to condition further output based on "new" information but that isn't learning. Another thing GPT4 has trouble with is generalizing knowledge. While it is certainly able to generalize to a degree (more or less it is able to apply patterns in the training data from one domain to other domains) if you ask it to generalize to things not well represented in the training data but nevertheless obvious from the conceptual underpinnings thereof it fails. I see this frequently with complicated functional/function level programming. GPT4 gets hopelessly confused when you ask it about non-trivial functions which return or manipulate other functions, even though conceptually there is nothing confusing about it and, in fact, if you ask it about functions as first class objects, it can answer with reasonable text.

Thus, GPT4 can appear to have knowledge in the sense of generating text indicating such, but fail to use that knowledge. This is the most compelling indication to me of limited or total lack of intelligence. I believe that the vast majority of GPT4's "capabilities" amount to memorization and permutation, not the formulation of accurate models of things.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#123

Post by nathan_compton »

pixl97 wrote: post #98
nathan_compton wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to admit this is a genuinely interesting question. Language models demonstrably do have some models of the world inside of them. And, I admit, what I say that they aren't intelligent, I mostly mean they are very stupid, rather than like a machine or algorithm. Artificial stupidity is progress.

Ok, so from your other comment, I think this is where our definition of intelligence is breaking down... Biological agents have a consistent world model based on their capabilities because an inconsistent model would lead to lack of reproduction or death. We could call this environmental intelligence. Meanwhile we have LLMs that have appear to have what I would consider 'micro' world models for some things, but not a…

I believe that the best way to understand these large language models is that they have models of patterns of text. To the extent that patterns of text are congruent with patterns in the world, they appear to function well, but I think, in the end, they are statistical models of text, not of the world, and that substantially limits their capabilities.

I do think multi-modal models will be interesting, but text is a very special sort of thing. It is widely available, semantically rich, and informationally pretty dense. I'm not sure there is such a nice set of properties for other modes. Consider that we have already almost reached training data exhaustion with text and it is, by far, the most voluminous/dense training mode there is.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#124

Post by Anthony-G »

ricardo81 wrote: post #41

Only skimmed through the article, it seems -AI from the title would be an old story? Also, that huge 4.7MB image in the head of the article...

Another good reason to use uBlock Origin and select the “Block media elements larger than x KB” option (x defaults to 50).

Edit: Wow! I just tried loading the page and see that the ridiculously large image still loads. That’s a particularly obnoxious website: the image’s HTTP header says that its Content-Length is 0 so it still gets downloaded by the browser.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#125

Post by ericd »

jmopp wrote: post #29
ericd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if your brain is mostly a statistical model of the world, with action probabilities based on what parts of it happen to be excited at the moment?

How do we know that the brain is a statistical model of the world? It sounds like explaining an unknown phenomenon using the technology du jour - just 10/20 years ago, the brain was a computer.

I don’t think we know that. The point of my comment is to poke a bit at human exceptionalism. I think we’re going to see something that’s hard to deny is intelligent come out of a combination of a world model and an RL agent within the next decade. But I’m sure some will try to keep moving the goalposts.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#126

Post by cyanydeez »

Roark66 wrote: post #109

>Actually, the current AI situation may be even more perilous than Jurassic Park. In that film, the misguided science that brought dinosaurs back to life was at least confined to a single island and controlled by a single corporation. In our current reality, the dinosaurs are loose, and anyone who wants to can play with one. I'm really tired of reading stuff like this above. Seriously, AI is a disruptive tech and som…

While true, the main problem the ChatGPT era presents is the ability to do powerful things with weakly defined understand.

This is like handing out footgun coupons to all citizens who become "of age" and saying it's cool cause they were already legally allowed to buy footguns.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#127

Post by dsr_ »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #77
dsr_ wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're entirely wrong about this. Using the term AI or artificial intelligence directly invokes several centuries of cultural baggage about golems, robots, Terminators, androids and cyborgs and Matrix-squid. Saying "large language models" does not. Saying "giant correlation networks" does not. Not to be too Sapir-Whorfian, but the terminology we use influences our conversations: terrorists, guerillas, rebels,…

Should a nuclear power station rebrand itself to avoid being associated with Hiroshima? I really don't get what you are trying to say.

If you choose your words carelessly, you get unintended results.

Telling me about the AI in your HR system that hunts for the best candidates brings along the cultural context of stories about AI. Telling me about the rules engine that ranks incoming CVs does not.

"terrorists, guerillas, rebels, revolutionaries, freedom-fighters" are all the same group of people being referred to in different ways depending on how the speaker wants you to feel about them. Once you start using a particular word, you adopt the same viewpoint.

"AI" is too loaded with cultural contexts which will cause people to make mistakes.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#128

Post by jprete »

majormajor wrote: post #83
jprete wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because a typical safe-to-run browser extension is written in such a way that it can be examined to see what it does. AI-based tools can’t be analyzed based on their code, so the only way to make them safe is by limiting their capabilities. Any such capability limit is likely to be either too constraining, not constraining enough, or require as much planning ability as the AI itself.

When you talk about not being able to analyze these based on their code do you mean because today they're all just calling out to OpenAI or whoever? The risks listed in the article itself mostly seem to fall under the same, non-AI-extension, core problem of "you're given them all your data." And that's a risk for non-AI-based extensions too, but if you look at the code of an AI one, it's gonna be obvious that it's sh…

> When you talk about not being able to analyze these based on their code do you mean because today they're all just calling out to OpenAI or whoever?

I mean that ML models are inherently inscrutable, it is extremely hard to determine how they operate internally, so no-one can identify any definite boundaries of what it will and will not output, or why. Hence prompt engineering, Bing's Sydney alternate personality, and weird hallucinated image artifacts.

Sure, if a user is calling OpenAI, they obviously can't understand the details of how it generates text. But neither can OpenAI! And if it produces something surprising, there's no way to fix it by directly modifying the model, the only way to do it is via ML techniques in the first place.

Post reply on HN