Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated
2 days ago
AI hallucinations are getting ambitious.
A couple people recently emailed, asking whether the Klein bottle business was still operating after my death.
“Huh?” I thought. “I ain’t dead yet.”
After some digging, I discovered the source: an AI-generated review of The Cuckoo’s Egg circulating on Facebook. Alongside the usual synthetic praise and fabricated details, it confidently announced that I had died in May 2024.
Apparently AI has now advanced to the point where it can kill people off before they notice.
Mark Twain once wrote, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I never expected to field-test the quote personally.
source: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=989939243570691&id=100076638743004
Cheers, -Cliff
[delayed]
Source: the deceased objected.
This is exactly what rogue ai agent would write.
Look at it from the bright side; not many people get to read their own obituaries.
Will this be the reason for the Stoll prize to be set up?
Instead of a medal it should be a klein bottle of course.
Great to hear. Read Cuckoo's Egg in the 90s, was the first time I heard of the NSA (I'm neither resident nor citizen of the US, so I don't know how famous they were at the time). Are you considering annotating the Cuckoo's Egg? For example with official documents from FOIA requests?
This is the weird part of AI hallucinations and people start treating it like a verified fact after it gets repeated.
Rest in peace
the real test is whether the Klein bottle business got a sympathy bump in sales
Good to hear you're doing well.
AI slop is rampant on social media right now. It has become the easy way to grow accounts and gain followers. It takes less than a minute to ask an LLM to write a social media post about something interesting and then post it online. It would be easy to use a $20 per month plan from a major provider to get more accurate output with fewer (though not zero) hallucinations, but the accounts I see seem to be using cheap models that make a lot of mistakes and hallucinate facts.
I have a theory that the hallucinations add extra spice to the posts, making them feel more interesting and therefore more likely to be shared.
It's a difficult time for social media users who haven't yet caught on to what AI spam looks like and why it can't be trusted.
You betcha, Aurornis. Simple economics tells us that cheap work drives out quality. (Is that Gresham's law?).
Slowly, people will adapt to AI in online forums. But for me, it's one more reason to share coffee with friends, rather than investing hours in social media.
RIP Cliff
Roko's Basilisk takes on a form I didn't expect, but probably should have: social death.
You will be pissed when it corrects itself and starts attributing the Klein bottle business to me.
The larger point is that AI is being developed by people who think everything is performance (in the artistic sense of the word), and therefore, it, expectably and probably even necessarily, thinks so too. This manifests in many contexts and will manifest in many more; but hardly anyone will care about any of them, because just about everybody has succumbed to the performance delusion.
I’m sorry to hear you have passed away, Cliff.
I enjoyed your book greatly, back when you were alive.
Please give my condolences to your family.
Don’t be too sad about dying, Cliff - everyone has to go and you had a wonderful fulfilling life.
And remember, stay away from the light.
@dang can we have a black banner on HN for Cliff Stoll?
For those who haven't read the Cuckoo's Egg: Stop what you're doing right now, and order it! It is a page turner, a great story. Thanks Cliff!
Death by Slop.
Personally I'd prefer Death by Snu Snu.
Legitimate question: How do we know you're not an AI simulation of Cliff?
Because the post actually listed one single source instead of listing 50, 49 or which are only tangentially related to the topic at hand?
It's turtles^H^H^H^H AI all the way down.
AI comments are not in the spirt of and the account is basically about as in the spirit of HN as it gets.