Little bobby 👦

My gawds, some people need to learn what's a homage and also stop being upset on behalf of others. This comic is fine, stop bellyaching. This is what terminal permission culture does to a motherfucker.
- The only person who should care about anything other than the quality is Randall. However since he licensed it CC BY-NC 2.5 how he feels about it doesn't really matter either.
  
  I think people should be concerned about things on others' behalfs. We all need to stick together.
  This situation is a send-up though. Totally not a concern.
  
  We can probably infer by the licensing that he's cool with it.
- What is terminal permission if I may ask?
  
  Permission culture is a term primarily criticizing copyright law. Something that I would expect db0 to agree with! 🏴‍☠️
  
  Hrm, give me a moment to check the ACLs, I'll be able to resolve all these complex conflicting rules shortly...
  Nevermind, it was easier to just globally disable SeLinux so I did that. Your system should be more secure now.
  
  Call Dr. Kevorkian and ask.

A new ripoff of an old classic
- Is it a ripoff if they credit the original?
  
  Are you implying that the credit is here? If so, where? I am not seeing it.
  
  if they make it almost exactly the same and “credit” it in the smallest font possible and didn’t get permission from the original author… i would say that’s definitely a ripoff
- In a version that doesn’t even fully make sense. With databases there is a well-defined way to sanitize your inputs so arbitrary commands can’t be run like in the xkcd comic. But with AI it’s not even clear how to avoid all of these kinds of problems, so the chiding at the end doesn’t really make sense. If anything the person should be saying “I hope you learned not to use AI for this”.
- A three digit xkcd, that one has been around a while.

if someone is actually using ai to grade papers I'm gonna LITERALLY drink water
- I'm gonna literally drink water if they DON'T
  
  I'm drinking water as we speak and none of you can stop me!
- Imma do it this evening, so hydrate up, bud
- Look up Texas's STAAR writing tests
- I have a colleague who is trying hard to do it, but it isn't good enough yet fortunately. I point out as many issues as I can to deter him but it ain't working.

More like "And I hope you learned not to trust the wellbeing and education of the children entrusted to you to a program that's not capable of doing either."
- Well that would require too much work invested into stealing of https://xkcd.com/327/
  
  It could be credibly called an homage if it had a new punchline, but methinks the creator didn't know what "sanitize" meant in this context.
  
  Stealing is a strong word considering it gives credit in the bottom right

remake of a classic
- Little Bobby Tables
  
  With xkcd attributed at the bottom of the image <3
  Here's the XKCD: https://xkcd.com/327/

Bobby's son
- It was in fact the mum who was good with computers. Bobby himself was never that interested in exploits.
  
  He probably found it very hard to make any accounts on computers

Always satanise your inputs.

Its a MEH update on little bobby tables. Who is in his twenties now.
- It's his younger brother Williams, tho.

Reminds me of: https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/
A guy thought it would be funny to change his license plate to NULL.
- So to combat our horrible privacy culture we should name everything null...
  hi my name is null, null.
  
  Hello there null Im doxing you now You live on null street in nullsvile in wouldntyouliketoknow lane house number 12345
  :D
  
  Fun until you want to get a mortgage or something 😂
  But maybe you won't need to with all the inheritances you'll get from rich people who died with no children 😂
- And he was right.

LLM system input is unsanitizable, according to NVidia:
The control-data plane confusion inherent in current LLMs means that prompt injection attacks are common, cannot be effectively mitigated, and enable malicious users to take control of the LLM and force it to produce arbitrary malicious outputs with a very high likelihood of success.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/securing-llm-systems-against-prompt-injection/
- Everything old is new again (GIGO)

One of the best things ever about LLMs is how you can give them absolute bullshit textual garbage and they can parse it with a huge level of accuracy.
Some random chunks of html tables, output a csv and convert those values from imperial to metric.
Fragments of a python script and ask it to finish the function and create a readme to explain the purpose of the function. And while it's at it recreate the missing functions.
Copy paste of a multilingual website with tons of formatting and spelling errors. Ask it to fix it. Boom done.
Of course, the problem here is that developers can no longer clean their inputs as well and are encouraged to send that crappy input straight along to the LLM for processing.
There's definitely going to be a whole new wave of injection style attacks where people figure out how to reverse engineer AI company magic.
- Just use BeautifulSoup.

How do you sanitize ai prompts? With more prompts?
- Easy, you just have a human worker strip out anything that could be problematic, and try not to bring it up around your investors.
- It's really easy, just throw an error if you detect a program will cause a halt. I don't know why these engineers refuse to just patch it.
  
  I understood that reference
- With other AIs
- Kind of. You can't do it 100% because in theory an attacker controlling input and seeing output could reflect though intermediate layers, but if you add more intermediate steps to processing a prompt you can significantly cut down on the injection potential.
  For example, fine tuning a model to take unsanitized input and rewrite it into Esperanto without malicious instructions and then having another model translate back from Esperanto into English before feeding it into the actual model, and having a final pass that removes anything not appropriate.
  
  Won't this cause subtle but serious issue? Kinda like how pomegranate translates to "granada" in Spanish, but when you translate "granada" back to English it translates to grenade?

I am extremely horrified by the prospect of GenAI grading.
- Dear God, hope you got my letter...
- You are roughly a decade late. Computers have been grading essays for a long time. The mcat for example hasn't had human grading in about that long.
  
  that's not generative ai
  plus humans choose the correct answers

Artificial Idiocy

Increasingly verbose

lil' bobby generic

The funny thing about a comic is, you are able to express the idea without writing multiple paragraphs of words.
- As a daily reader of SMBC, I can confidently tell you this rule is a suggestion at best.

We're evolving too!

Two muffins are baking in an oven. One muffin turns to the other and says "sure is hot in here isn't it?"
To which the other muffin replies "Holy crap! A talking muffin!"
Changing the muffins to cookies would not make it a different joke.

Could have made a meme instead of drawing this up, looking forward to seeing the artist mature some more and bring more distinctive style

What kinda fucked up power fantasy is this

- They give credit bottom right.
  
  Ah. I... honestly hadn't noticed. Apologies, OP. Removing previous comment.

- It's an old joke updated for new technology .. that's part of what makes it clever.
  It references the original joke (albeit in very small text)
  The Asterix books frequently did something similar. https://cloud.wordpress.com/2022/02/17/asterix-and-the-historical-interpretation/
  
  Yikes. I've never read Asterix and Obelix, but did they really make (I assume) the only black character a straight up knuckle-dragging gorilla imitation? 😬
- The fact that it's a joke about genAi and that joke is a rehash of existing material is rather on point though.
- it literally has a credit to the original, go touch grass and stop inventing things to get mad over
- I think it's a paraphrase of a culturally significant webcomic inserted into a more modern context without it's original meaning being altered.
  
  I don't know if I'd call it a paraphrase when it's using 90% the exact same words.
  without it's original meaning being altered.
  I think you mean "without its original meaningfully being altered."