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Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

kabir.au

261–270 of 502 posts

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#261
post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

Smart people will use LLMs to learn things faster. Education will adapt by doing all assessments in person.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this overlooks the potency and scarcity of 1:1 time with the teacher. If you've only got maybe a few minutes of that in an average schoolday there's a huge difference between whether or not you've talked it through with an AI before trying the question out on the teacher. They're wrong sometimes, but usually in verifiable ways. And they don't seem to know the difference between medicine and bioterrorism, so o…

And now they'll have less time because they will be bombarded with slop to no end.

Obviously generating your homework is a bad idea, and maybe assigning homework that can be generated is a bad idea. But neither of those are relevant to the problem I'm talking about which is about due diligence prior to asking for somebody's extended attention.

Whether you're in class or at work, it's just courteous to ask an AI first.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#263
post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

> Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence.

So something like, "Frontier AI has broken the 'high school' or 'university' format"?

The hype surrounding AI is just pervasively exhausting: you've got the folks talking about an entire new age for humanity where we're shortly going to take over the entire universe. And you've got the folks talking about how our entire society is crumbling.

Education is one place folks seem to throw up their hands and say nothing can be done.

The fix is simple: students are to be evaluated on their performance in person. That's it.

Any other "collapse of education" isn't due to AI, it's something else.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#264
post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

In my university education (2007-2011), 80% of the grade was based on exams at the end of each year, with no resits.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#265
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t say you’re wrong but the last anecdote describes many I’ve had to review for jobs long before LLMs. Fizzbuzz is a classic thing that shockingly many devs genuinely cannot do, even at home.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

Why hire them at all then, just ask them what their favorite AI is and use that

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#266
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had human teachers who did that in middle/high school. Took me many years to pick out all the hallucinated bits of "knowledge". I don't think the current models are any less reliable that what we currently have on average.

I'll always remember my middle school science teaching telling us that nuclear fusion violates conservation of mass because the 2 protons in a pair of hydrogen nuclei combine to make helium with 4 nucleons. It's not true, but that's not the point. But he was a great teacher anyway. He was engaging and kept the kids in line and learning. I eventually learned the truth, and most of my classmates forgot about it. Teachi…

I mean fusion and fission do violate conservation of mass and conservation of energy, they just don't violate conservation of mass and energy, right? We thought mass was strictly conserved until Einstein, and then we updated our understanding.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#267
You can introduce canaries, and ban auto-pwning in general. that's usually banned anyways. Some challenges just can't be solved by a human in under a certain period of time.

Another idea is deep red herrings. solves that lead to more solves, on and on, except only if the previous solves were solved quickly. The effect will be that participants who solve things quickly will keep finding things to solve. they can't know that the path they're on will lead to victory, even if they artificially slow down, unless they consistently slow down just as a human would. It will eliminate the speed advantage. For the skill advantage, other than having another LLM procedurally generate challenges, I don't know of a good solution.

There are always things like captchas. or the good 'ol honor system. A person can spend only so much for things that have no financial reward in the end, only clout.

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Alright, all that said, i think i really do have a good solution for this, as well as academic exams. Or I think I do, because it's so simple, I've been scratching my head as to why everyone isn't doing it already.

Require screen sharing/recording. LLMs can't fake that well enough. Have another LLM audit the video for mouse, key stroke, window movement and other details to see if it looks human-generated or not.

If a student has an essay assignment, have them record their screen as they research, and actually type out the whole thing. In the extreme, require anti-cheat proctoring software installed, as is done in remote examination. In an even more high-stakes and extreme scenario, have them share their face. Their eye and face movement, correlated with the screen-share, and correlated with the activity observed on the server end, should be pretty hard to beat, even in the next ~5 years of LLM advances.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There actually is a law of conservation of mass (it's the same law, because mass is energy) and it only appears violated if you forget about the particles that are zooming away at the speed of light. Of course the mass of a system changes if mass can flow in and out.

Mass is not the same as energy. Mass can be converted to energy or has energy, but a photon, for example, is massless while carrying energy.

[deleted]

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.

I first did fizz buzz about 10 years ago fresh out of college. Now, after 10 years in full stack and fully vibe coding, I forgot basic python syntax. An interview like yours would have false positives if you are checking for syntax because well, its like looking up spelling, I just ask the AI for the syntax inline.

> I forgot basic python syntax

If you cannot write "basic syntax" for any language then you are not a programmer, and certainly not a software engineer? This is not a value judgement, it's ok (probably good tbh) to not be a programmer. But you are wasting everyone's time by interviewing for a programming position in this case.

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