[HN Gopher] Bing Chat responses infiltrated by ads pushing malware
___________________________________________________________________
Bing Chat responses infiltrated by ads pushing malware
Author : pixiemaster
Score : 104 points
Date : 2023-09-28 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
| bilekas wrote:
| I don't know for sure but if true, it's seems that fake ad
| posters can't specifically say yes/no to being used on bing
| results.
|
| So in a funny way the AI is bringing easier access to the malware
| sites than a traditional search engine would. I'm sure the
| cretins are delighted with Microsoft right now. For the given
| test question, the first answer in any search engine would have
| been the official site.
| araes wrote:
| How many of these can be bundled into an automated install that
| occurs without the user doing much of anything, or requiring only
| a single click on an ad that looks reasonable? Can I have the
| chatbot simply download the installer as part of the response?
| "By implicitly clicking the 'provide response', you've agreed to
| this download. Surprise!"
|
| Access Controller or Modifier, Automated Downloader,
| Communication Modifier or "man-in-the-middle", Email or Msg
| Spoofer, Software Backdoor, Rootkit / Bootkit, Website or Browser
| Redirector, Activity Monitor, Data Scraper, Duplicator,
| Eavesdropper, Exit Node Logger, Keylogger, Locator, Path Tracer,
| Sniffer, Snooper, Bricker, Fork Bomb, Logic Bomb, Time Bomb,
| Adware, Browser "Helper", Crimeware, Cryptojacker, Malware
| (generic), Ransomware, Scareware, Spyware
|
| Links to the Wiki articles on each topic are at:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Araesmojo/Computer_Securi...
|
| Ignore the rest unless you want to read about Shadowrun /
| Neuromancer / Ghost in the Shell speculation.
| svaha1728 wrote:
| It's fairly obvious Microsoft is ahead of its skis trying to lock
| down the new market. I'm glad they aren't building self-driving
| cars yet.
|
| At this point I'm guessing anything in Azure Repos or private
| Github repositories are just a small oopsie away from being
| leaked by some accidental training mistake or misconfigured
| token.
| 88913527 wrote:
| Seems like corporations are jumping straight to extinction,
| bypassing the embracing and extending. You have to at least
| make something people want to use before pulling up the
| drawbridge.
| cmgriffing wrote:
| Irony Alert: The bleeping computer website consumes 700MB+ RAM on
| the page of an article that talks about malicious ads.
|
| https://twitter.com/cmgriffing/status/1707511082947158445
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| The irony of Windows 11, which is marketed as a secure operating
| system, is that it is riddled with links to Bing that are
| infested with scam ads.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| We're talking about a farmer advertising to chickens that their
| hen house is safe from foxes. True as it may be, you'll still
| there to produce value for the farmer and finally end up in a
| soup.
| roody15 wrote:
| Bing Chat is just terrible. It tries to merge neutered ChatGPT
| with promoted web content. It's really too bad as Microsoft had
| an opportunity here to leverage this into something great.
| Instead they are like how can we control the output.. simplify
| the responses and make money pushing people to certain sites and
| services.
| bastard_op wrote:
| Gee, after watching internet explorer 1-6 and beyond, I never saw
| that coming.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I really do not understand the benefits supposedly of this tech
| over a traditional search engine. All it's doing is pulling the
| top hit from Bing and saying it back to you in a chat format. The
| AI doesn't understand what IP Scanning software is, nor does it
| understand malware, nor does it understand anything about what
| you're saying, it literally just doesn't. It takes what you
| asked, stuffs it into bing, and reads out the results to you.
|
| I understand why people want AI search engines, the problem is,
| this is not an AI search engine. None of them are to my
| knowledge. It's just an ML bot mediating a search between you and
| the engine. The web page accomplishes the exact same task,
| without the unearned air of authority.
|
| Like, the IDEA of an AI search engine, an artificial intelligence
| that knows all this stuff and can weigh in alongside you with
| insight and comprehension, that's _incredibly cool._ But this is
| not that. ChatGPT _knows much_ but _understands nothing._
| fragmede wrote:
| If I already know the name of what I'm looking for, a
| traditional search engine is great. But if I'm in unfamiliar
| territory; say I'm a programmer and not an accountant, how long
| would I need to search in a traditional engine to find the
| magic word ERP?
| collaborative wrote:
| Neither Google nor MS will ever get AI search right because the
| only applicable use of AI in a search engine is to remove the
| seo/junk/ads/clickbait and give the user what he is looking
| for. This goes against their core business (ads)
|
| Engines like you.com, phind.com, aisearch.vip, or kagi have the
| advantage because their business model doesn't depend on this
| fragmede wrote:
| What would you consider proof of understanding?
|
| What question could we ask that would convince you that a
| hypothetical future system actually understands what it's
| spitting out, regardless of if it were based on current LLM
| technology or not?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >What would you consider proof of understanding?
|
| In the search engine/chatbot context pretty straight forward,
| having the capacity to automatically correct obviously
| illogical or non/counter factual info.
|
| Say I do a historical search and bing or chatgpt hallucinate
| something that's wildly implausible or straight up makes no
| sense. If it could spot that _on its own_ and say. "I'll
| consult some credible sources specifically to resolve that,
| as what I have found doesn't check out" and then comes up
| with something that's congruent, that'd show understanding.
|
| Same with code. Understanding code would imply something like
| being able to run a code snippet through a debugger,
| interpret the meaning of the error message, and fixing what's
| broken. Right now these things give you nothing more but a
| stochastic guess.
|
| This is not a philosophical argument about what it "means" to
| understand btw, just real limitations. Right now it is always
| the user who has to supplement the understanding and coax
| these systems into fixing any mistake they make.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _this is not an AI search engine. [...] It 's just an ML bot
| mediating a search between you and the engine_
|
| Pure semantics. This whole class of _" it's not AI, it's ML"_
| argument is incredibly tedious, these arguments rely on
| implicit special snowflake definitions of AI. Arguments like "
| _real_ AI can _understand_ things " are completely ass-pulled.
| Who ever said that true understanding, whatever the hell that
| even means, is a necessary quality of an AI? This isn't taught
| in any university AI course (which teach even ELIZA as an early
| form of AI), nor is such a meaning implicit in popular culture,
| so where is it even coming from?
| eichin wrote:
| There's a meme in some AI circles that "once we understand
| it, it isn't AI anymore" and things like ML, NLP, and most of
| the Machine Vision field, while they came from AI, have
| "escaped" and are no longer AI because we've actually figured
| them out. That's probably some of what you're seeing; it's
| probably also colliding with "AI is an umbrella over a bunch
| of technologies, AGI is scifi/fantasy" which is pushing the
| other way - that one is a little tainted by the whole
| "intelligence is uniquely human" bit of wishful thinking,
| where the former is expressing the simpler idea that "I can
| estimate and ship a product that uses NLP; any estimate about
| an AI product is a lie"...
| yid wrote:
| A lot of the value comes from follow-up questions. Imagine
| being able to interrogate a StackOverflow answer with new
| constraints and details. Not always correct, but in some cases,
| faster that typing in a new search term and parsing a screen
| full of links.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| But again, the AI doesn't know. It's going to search around
| the internet and probably take a closer look at what it
| already told you, but that's it. It takes a plethora of
| information and attempts to digest it into knowledge but it
| lacks the understanding with which to accomplish this task.
|
| Unless I guess you train an AI on a given topic, like a few
| languages or a database or something. But given ChatGPT's
| apparent vulnerability to just making shit up, you'll have to
| call me skeptical if this has any real use.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Because having the AI do it for you is faster than doing it
| yourself.
|
| Not as accurate, but faster.
|
| For some people - I am reluctant to say "for some use
| cases" - that's very appealing.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I am dreadfully curious what use cases you're envisioning
| where a fast, bad/wrong answer is better for anything
| than a correct, slower answer.
|
| Like hell, if that's the standard, I'll be ChatGPT. You
| won't need an outrageous graphics card to ask me a
| question and I'll get you an answer right away. It'll
| almost certainly be the wrong answer, and is just an ass-
| pulled guess, but if that's all you want, I'll setup a
| chat website for myself and start taking queries today.
| Then investors can give me 10 billion dollars.
| verdagon wrote:
| Sometimes, having a quick, inaccurate, but easily-
| verifiable answer is better. For example, when you're
| trying to remember the name of that one function to call,
| or ideas on where to travel next month.
|
| Also, not super relevant, but in e.g. combat situations
| one is often better off running _now_ in any direction
| rather than pondering which direction is absolutely
| optimal for running from the lion. You 'll know soon
| enough whether it was the right direction. There's
| probably a metaphor somewhere in there.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > I am dreadfully curious what use cases you're
| envisioning where a fast, bad/wrong answer is better for
| anything than a correct, slower answer.
|
| >> For some people - I am reluctant to say "for some use
| cases" - that's very appealing.
|
| You're preaching to the choir.
|
| However, do keep in mind that even authoritative sources
| found during your own research may be inaccurate. And for
| some questions, which answer is "right" or "wrong" may
| not be black and white.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > However, do keep in mind that even authoritative
| sources found during your own research may be inaccurate.
| And for some questions, which answer is "right" or
| "wrong" may not be black and white.
|
| I mean, sure. But again: that's just my point restated.
| What is this doing that a _standard search engine does
| not?_
|
| Like, I put shit in my phone's calendar and set reminders
| so that I don't to think about it anymore. That is a
| cognitive load (remembering my dentist appointment) that
| I have now offloaded to technology. And that's useful as
| all hell, which is why my phone's calendar is full to the
| tits of everything one would put in a calendar. Now I
| don't need to think about it. I get messages from my
| phone when events are coming up, and I get a literal
| calendar on my screen when I want it, showing me all
| these things with perfect accuracy.
|
| What is BingGPT in this scenario offloading? It's just a
| search engine but slower. It doesn't understand what good
| software is, so it can't make value based judgements on
| which to recommend. It doesn't know what reliable sources
| are, and can't evaluate for them, so every bit of
| information you get back must be treated with a grain of
| salt. It (probably) doesn't even remotely conceive of
| _why you are asking it a thing_ or _what a good answer to
| that query would look like_ because it doesn 't know
| _you,_ it just knows a massive, incomprehensible amount
| of averages about a ton of things that might be what you
| want.
|
| And like, that's fine, search engines have had these
| limitations for my entire life. That's why I'm saying, I
| don't understand why this is better. It's the same thing
| as Bing, but slower, and in a chat box.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > I mean, sure. But again: that's just my point restated.
| What is this doing that a standard search engine does
| not?
|
| And again, it is quicker than clicking multiple links and
| can generalize / contextualize what it finds, mapping it
| to the answer you're looking for.
|
| Have you tried asking one of these tools to write some
| simple scripts for you? It works decently, actually.
|
| If you didn't already know how to program, this could
| save you a TON of time, even if it doesn't work perfectly
| on the first try.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If you didn 't already know how to program, this could
| save you a TON of time, even if it doesn't work perfectly
| on the first try._
|
| Nice thing is, if it doesn't work perfectly on the first
| try, you can describe the problem (or paste the whole
| output, errors included), and get back a fixed version
| that's likely to work this time around.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| ChatGPT doesn't "almost certainly" give you a wrong
| answer (especially if you're not asking it math
| problems). The reason that it hallucinating sometimes is
| so bad is that it happens _rarely_. If it happened all
| the time, you'd never use it or trust it. It's just that
| it happens _enough_ that it's annoying to have to double
| check everything.
| yid wrote:
| Here's my pet example...feel free to google around
| yourself on this.
|
| Problem: I want an AWS CLI command line that requests a
| whole bunch of wildcard certificates from AWS Certificate
| Manager (ACM) for a TLD.
|
| Ostensible solution: the AWS official docs have a small
| snippet to achieve this, BUT -- the snippet on the
| official page is inadvisable as it leads to a browser
| cert warning.
|
| So I (skeptically) asked ChatGPT for a command line to
| achieve what I was trying to do.
|
| Try 1: got basically the snippet from the AWS official
| docs (but with the inadvisable flag set to the _Correct_
| value, strangely)
|
| Prompt 2: please give me more best practice options
|
| Try 2: get back a bunch of new CLI options and their
| meanings. 3 are useful. 1 is hallucinated. 1 is
| deprecated.
|
| Prompt 3: keep going with more options
|
| Try 3: 2 more useful new options, 2 more options I chose
| not to use
|
| As a skeptic, the overall experience was much more
| efficient that googling around or even reading a manpage.
| I put it all on the fact that context is maintained
| between questions, so you don't have to repeat yourself
| when asking for clarifications.
| airstrike wrote:
| this. in my experience, GPT-4 _really_ shines for groking
| AWS commands, writing JavaScript code and helping me
| understand some errors when compiling my terrible Rust
| code
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm kind of surprised this worked. Did you actually use
| the command you ended up with? I'm not even surprised
| because I think ChatGPT can't figure this out in
| principle, but because the data itself is poisoned. The
| top link on every web search I've ever used to AWS CLI
| commands is to documentation for v1, but v1 has been
| deprecated for years and the page usually begins with a
| statement telling you not to use it. Amazon's problem is
| they never remove old documentation from the web, so 90%
| of what you find for any given service is no longer
| correct.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _and the page usually begins with a statement telling
| you not to use it_
|
| This might be a big part of why GP's case works. The
| model (GPT-4) most likely understands the concept of
| documentation being deprecated, so the more often v1 docs
| say it, the stronger a semantic link between current and
| obsolete docs, and the more likely it is for ChatGPT to
| give you answer based on non-deprecated docs.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _I am dreadfully curious what use cases you 're
| envisioning where a fast, bad/wrong answer is better for
| anything than a correct, slower answer._
|
| Almost anything related to software development. Any
| answer I get online, whether from Wikipedia or a Github
| search or a Stack Overflow question or anywhere else,
| will require careful study and adaptation before I can
| use it. There will inevitably be things about any given
| solution that don't apply to whatever I'm doing, or that
| will be out-and-out wrong. But does that mean I'd be
| better off without doing a search at all? Of course not.
|
| Same with AI. It can point me in the right direction and
| save me a lot of trouble, but it can't (yet) do my job
| for me.
|
| When it gets 10x better -- and I'm sure it will -- then
| that last part can be expected to change. Which is
| awesome.
|
| Meanwhile, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia and Github aren't
| going to get 10x better, ever. Not without cross-
| pollinating with AI.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| GPT4 "knows" a lot more about most topics than any single
| human does. People have this idea that it absolutely needs
| to be perfectly correct at all times to be useful, but
| would never hold a human being to that standard.
|
| How many times have you asked a co-worker about something
| and they gave you a convincing answer that was totally
| wrong? Did it make you stop asking co-workers for help?
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| > Did it make you stop asking co-workers for help?
|
| That specific unreliable coworker who doesn't properly
| qualify that they aren't completely certain ... I believe
| for most people, yes.
|
| We tend not to trust bullshitters.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I _VERY_ much more trust a coworker to know things than I
| do this AI, especially given not just the subject of this
| thread, but the larger conversation around it. ChatGPT
| has a reputation already for just spewing out complete
| nonsense. Didn 't Bing's implementation argue with
| someone about what freaking year it was not awfully long
| ago?
|
| These chat bots "know" a shit ton and a half of stuff in
| that they are connected to the largest collection of
| knowledge known to man, the Internet. But "knowing" and
| "understanding" are two different things. The various
| search engines also "know" a ton about where to find
| things online, that doesn't mean they know shit _about
| those things._ And as we 're seeing here: without the
| context to know that when someone wants an IP scanner,
| they want something good, that won't give their computer
| malware, that'll be reasonably priced or even open
| source, or even what platform, it just gives an answer
| based on a search.
|
| _You could just search for ip scanning software and
| gotten all the information BingGPT shared with the author
| of the piece._
|
| And like, if you wanted to be charitable, you could say
| "well the author should've given more information about
| what they wanted" but again, that's not different from an
| existing search engine and more crucially: the AI didn't
| ask questions. Didn't ask for platform, how much they
| wanted to spend, if they preferred open source, or even
| something more general like what they were trying to
| accomplish. Nada. Just did a search, and reported
| results.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Didn 't Bing's implementation argue with someone about
| what freaking year it was not awfully long ago?_
|
| I'm sorry, but that's a stellar example of _holding an
| LLM wrong_. These models are frozen in time.
|
| > _But "knowing" and "understanding" are two different
| things._
|
| Indeed, and that is a big part of misunderstanding. GPT-4
| is, on many topics, closer to _understanding_ than
| _knowing_ (note that neither is a subset of the other).
| The conceptual patterns are there, even if sometimes are
| easy to accidentally overpower by the prompt, or by the
| sequence of tokens already emitted.
| noAnswer wrote:
| > Did it make you stop asking co-workers for help?
|
| One usually stops asking the bullshitter, yes.
| falsenapkin wrote:
| Coworkers answering wrong gets me to stop asking them for
| help, yes, especially if it's confident or they can't
| qualify uncertainty or I know their ratio of Q&A site
| visits vs 1st party docs visits is abysmal. There are
| even people I won't ask for help because they trust
| people that I don't trust.
|
| Conversely, there are people who I will go to for topics
| that they are not the SME in, maybe their teammate even
| is, but I trust their ability to do quality research and
| intelligently interpret that research for case specific
| nuances. Like I'll go to the networking guy to talk about
| some DB thing because the DB guys are morons and live and
| die by junk SEO sites but the networking guy can think
| analytically and find the source of truth documentation
| and provide excerpts from it.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >How many times have you asked a co-worker about
| something and they gave you a convincing answer that was
| totally wrong?
|
| Never actually. My coworkers have never told me something
| with confidence that they just made up. If they don't
| know an answer, they may provide hints and directions,
| but it will be clear they don't know.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Maybe I just work with good people but I feel the same.
| Often we will verify things together but I'd say they
| never they just make things up.
| hackermatic wrote:
| It feels like the people who develop "search results to GPT" or
| "random website to GPT" features should know better by now.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| They know. They also don't care. It's not their hide that's on
| the line.
| dylan604 wrote:
| they should "know better" or they know exactly what they are
| doing? why do we keep thinking these things are not working as
| intended?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| For the record, Microsoft stole this idea from me, and I
| implemented it first, although as a parody:
| https://future.attejuvonen.fi
| liminalsunset wrote:
| It seems like after it disables non-prerecorded queries, you
| also stop losing social credits. a query that previously
| appeared to decrease the credit count no longer does.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Microsoft, scammy ads, malware, bad programmers. They all come in
| a package.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Ah yes all those "bad programmers" at MS. They have over 220K
| employees; statistically the odds are they have plenty better
| than you.
| r00fus wrote:
| It may have more to do with the alignment of incentives shown
| in this Microsoft org structure tree [1]
|
| [1] https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-
| amazon...
| lainga wrote:
| Counterpoint: It took only one of me (sitting on my butt) to
| not create Teams, which, despite a small principality's worth
| of better minds than I, Microsoft has historically struggled
| to do
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-28 23:01 UTC)