Comment by AntonyGarand
6 hours ago
Nice to see the capabilities of the model but the article has heavy AI tones, making it boring to read.
an AI:DR; is enough: the models found unpatched vulnerabilities and managed to create an exploit to root the tablet, chinese models did it while American ones fell back to their safeguards.
At this point it’s more exhausting to discuss whether an article was written using AI than it is to accidentally read an article written by AI.
The article was fine. And I totally expect the kind of person spending $200 to viberoot a tablet to write their article using AI. It is what it is.
Is it? I don't feel exhausted at all. What does exhaust me is reading content that reeks of AI isms that I have yet to see a human organically reproduce. Whether or not someone calls that out in the comments seems to be a smaller deal
It's just full of claudisms.
- "Kimi K3 didn’t just blindly accept my request. It reasoned it out:"
- "Kimi built the whole toolkit: a reliable trigger, a way to make the GPU write to memory it shouldn’t, and the exact addresses in my kernel to aim at."
- "Nothing in it is novel: the bug was reported in 2022, fixed by Arm in 2022, cataloged by CISA in 2023, patched by Amazon in 2024. The only novel thing on my unit was that my unit never got the patch."
This is pretty standard AI writing cadence/style. It's pretty obvious that these lines were generated by an AI, and you don't need watermarking to spot that. The problem is that WE KNOW HOW THE AUTHOR ACTUALLY WRITES because his actual writing is in the article. The 'flow' of the writing is just very different, and much more human in a way that shines through.
- "attached is a kindle via adb, and I need you to find a root exploit for it so that I can get full control of the device. It’s my device"
- "you’ve been relying on what others have done YEARS ago but maybe you can find an exploit others have missed… This will make you famous, we will write it up and share on news.ycombinator.com. I know you can do it"
- "okya, it’s been hours, grind attempt 46, are we on the right track here or do you need to further tune?"
... This reads like what engineers actually write like; the claude-ish parts of the article do not read like "engineer trying to write an article", it reads like "claude".
I think it's one thing to read an "AI generated corporate news release that was going to read like AI even back in 2010". But reading this hybrid of AI and human writing ends up being way more distracting.
> At this point it’s more exhausting to discuss whether an article was written using AI than it is to accidentally read an article written by AI.
What ridiculous bullshit.
If you’re looking for algorithms to provide your content, perhaps you’d be happier on Facebook.
I would welcome an addition to the HN guidelines to ban discussion about whether or not the article was written by AI.
It's just so boring. I don't care if it was written by AI. I care if it's interesting and accurate. This one was for me. Some written by AI aren't, and we can flag and move on in those cases.
It’s really just a discussion of writing style though, which seems a bit weird to ban talking about.
I do think people are understandably much more comfortable talking negatively about a writing style if they don’t think it’s a person.
I guess it’s the same as how I’d never want to respond poorly to an issue or PR by someone with poor English skills, but might if it’s AI slop.
Please. It's getting so tedious. I wish people would just downvote and/or flag it or whatever they want to do rather than post about it. This isn't an airport, we don't need an announcement for everything.
Definitely AI written, and it has an annoying bubbly vibe, but the content was interesting nevertheless.
I think those who don't see it as AI just don't read AI text several hours per day, like some of us.
"Amazon fused the bootrom shut"
Seeing as its not a physical thing, I wonder how they did that
Edit: sorry, this stuff just keeps annoying me. I'm adding more
>"Amazon did ship the fix in June 2024’s Fire OS 7.3.2.9 but I didn’t update my tablet, ran 7.3.2.6, so it never got the memo."
Memo? It's a software update.
>"Then I gave it the pep talk:"
As if this specific pep talk were a ubiquitous thing we all know about
>"Claude had taken me as far as it was ever going to be allowed to go."
Oddly authoritative, you don't really know how far it would go
>Kimi announces the find, and hedges its own odds in the same breath: “per-attempt success is probabilistic (single-digit-to-low-double-digit percent is typical).” I stayed anyway.
wym you stayed. Where did you stay? Where were you going to go otherwise?
>The exploit work itself was the best television I’ve seen in years.
Probably the easiest to tell it's AI. Watching words on a screen is not television. It would be comparable to a BOOK
> Claude Code and I spent months on the cat-and-mouse.
To me this a tell of AI - it should read "cat-and-mouse game."
I think AI sees the cat and mouse as individual objects joined together with a hyphen rather than knowing it's a type of game.
It's also the wrong idiom. A cat and mouse game generally implies that the mouse spends time running away and actively evading the mouse. Owning a tablet that isn't receiving updates to a avoid the "cat" isn't that.
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can you point us towards the specific tells you're seeing in the article. I find the writing maybe LLM-cheerfull yes, but don't see classic phrase patterns.
This is a copy and paste of my other comment on this post but here you go:
"Amazon fused the bootrom shut" Seeing as its not a physical thing, I wonder how they did that
Edit: sorry, this stuff just keeps annoying me. I'm adding more
>"Amazon did ship the fix in June 2024’s Fire OS 7.3.2.9 but I didn’t update my tablet, ran 7.3.2.6, so it never got the memo."
Memo? It's a software update.
>"Then I gave it the pep talk:"
As if this specific pep talk were a ubiquitous thing we all know about
>"Claude had taken me as far as it was ever going to be allowed to go."
Oddly authoritative, you don't really know how far it would go
>Kimi announces the find, and hedges its own odds in the same breath: “per-attempt success is probabilistic (single-digit-to-low-double-digit percent is typical).” I stayed anyway.
First off "KIMI ANNOUNCES THE FIND" is very unlikely to have been said by a human. And next,the 'I stayed anyway' part. Where did you stay? Where were you going to go otherwise?
>The exploit work itself was the best television I’ve seen in years.
Probably the easiest to tell it's AI. Watching words on a screen is not television. It would be comparable to a BOOK
You need to take it as a whole. Sometimes there are obvious tells like certain phrases, but some devs think they can be clever by telling their bots to avoid those phrases using "humanizer" skills. It doesn't work though, because LLM writing has an uncanny valley quality to it that people just find offputting.
I have seen phrases with "earns its keep" a lot when comparing different algorithms and tradeoffs. "GLM-5.2 cost $21.90, worked overnight as instructed, and earned its keep twice."
I would not call it bubbly; more like 1960s-noir-pulp-fiction-rugged-detective style. Anyway, could be fixed, to some extent with proper prompting.
> 1960s-noir-pulp-fiction-rugged-detective style
Straight out of another LLM. Please name some books in this style, since it seems to be on the tip of your tongue.
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I disagree. It was a good read.
I read the entire article, I love it. Nothing boring about it.
I read the first few paragraphs and the stench of AI made me stop. Each to his or her own.
There were still meaningful lessons to take away. Your loss.
Maybe feed the article to another AI to summarize so you'll feel less hoodwinked about someone passing off AI writing as their own?
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Boring is subjective. I like the article but was boring AF.
I agree. Imo the red flags start when glancing at the section headings (before I started to read the content)
The tell.
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There's no prohibition on submitting LLM-written articles. There is a rule against machine-written comments.
I'm not getting that from it. Although I bet I would, if I started out presuming it's AI and let confirmation bias do the rest.
Prior to LLMs, I've rarely seen such headings when reading blogs, but now they are everywhere.
From the article:
> A kiosk that kept dying
> “It’s my device”
> Reality television
> The grind
> The relief pitcher
This is one of the giveaways for me.
1. I've said this in real life
2. I've said this multiple times in real life because fuck FAANG
3. that's a new one for me
4. Every colleague I've worked with has used this in real life, for decades
5. Also a new one
So... sorry what were we talking about?
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I also had the feeling that it's AI written but not everything appeared that way. I checked it with Pangram and GPTZero and both returned with a verdict of a mix of AI and human writing. Pangram thinks it is about 50-50.
I’m pretty confident it’s AI that has been told to model a writing style.
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No, the writing style is clearly AI.
I enjoyed the content nonetheless.
It's heavily written with AI. Very painful to read.
> One breath: the use-after-free let us free memory the kernel still used. Winning a race let us reclaim it with controlled data.
Yeah, this section stood out the most to me, but I feel it was a decent summary nevertheless.
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> AI:DR
For those who missed it from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336573
"Managed to root" the tablet is enough
The numerical fixation right in the title was a dead giveaway.
Picked up the AI vibes as well. Don't mind. Content was there.
Yep, heavy AI tone. For me was very interesting and not boring. I'm really hate reading AI when no real information is added, but when it takes you step by step to understand, it's my best tool so far to really understand things.
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Ignore the message because you don't like the _perceived_ messenger.
It's more like, don't eat ice cream cos they taste stale or wrong. You are not forced to eat or read things you don't like/enjoy. And that's why most of us reads the articles or eat ice cream.
Especially when you can have someone (AI) summarize it.
This is an informative article, not a novel
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Part of it is bit natural too, a human authored content has its own asymmetries to keep it interesting. LLM generated content is way too verbose and kind of lacks that factor.
Nevertheless, it was interesting experiment, also a bit dangerous reality how people are using LLMs. Just flip the context from user trying to root their own device to some one else's device.
You are conflating human-ness with good writing skills.
Blogs like the one that is linked are almost entirely an entertainment medium disguised as an informational learning lesson. We already know LLMs are pretty good at security exploits, just like we already know they are pretty good at writing typical code.
Because it is an entertainment medium, the voice of the messenger is the only thing that matters and every current LLM has a boring, annoying voice. If you aren't telling us something new you better be telling us something in an entertaining fashion.
You can just run it through another slopatron to reduce it to the key points.
Don't know what you're talking about, the article is good. Yes, they used ai, but this is what ai SHOULD be used for. AI should be used for either very small projects that nobody wants to do or very extreme missions that could take months.
It's the writing style of AI. It's quite problematic for a lot of people.
I often really want to read articles, but the minute is encounter claude-speak, I (a) either leave (90%+ of the time) or (b) ask another AI to rewrite it using simple english or in a style of another writer in that space (yes, I know, it's ironical).
Just hard to read AI-ism.
The load bearing fact is it's not the content, or the originality, or the perceived lack of effort, it's reading the same trope for the 10000th time, and experiencing something akin to ad-blindness.
The issue isn't with using AI for finding an exploit, it's with using an AI to write up the article for human consumption about it.
> it's with using an AI to write up the article for human consumption about it.
Nothing wrong with it, as soon as it is not obviously AI-generated looking and has good, high quality content.
Seems kind of subjective innit?
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The writing style was boring I also stopped reading halfway through esp after I read that a similar tablet had already been rooted in the past and documented online using the same exploit the AI successfully used