Screenshot from May 16 2025 Nostr user Alex Gleason showing the AI added code to his app publishing his crypto wallets private key, which grants full access to the money in the wallet, via what looks like the JSON metadata of a Nostr message. It’s followed by comments thanking him for the cryoto money and sarcastically asking him if he has tried learning programming.
I’m inclined to agree. I mean, this case is a bit different, in that it’s a person that supposedly could have done this properly taking a bad shortcut. But still, don’t take shortcuts on money stuff. That’s kind of on you (and what you get for cryptobroing anyway).
That’s not to say it isn’t impressive how helpful machine generation can be for trivial tasks where there’s no security risk or a huge stack of dependencies. It’s not even a bad way to learn to do it yourself if you are at that point where you can sort of know what you need to do but struggle to implement it.
It’s weird to be in the agnostic region of this stuff because there’s a bunch of garbage applications being incorrectly used or implemented I’d happily discuss, but I’m not ready to make cultish hatred for machine generated content a significant part of my personality.
But hey, Google has managed to make its spellchecker unlearn the difference between “its” and “it’s”, I suspect by plugging it into a language model. I’m not here to say it’s all good.
Reminds me of 4chan figuring out how to mess with how Google was transcribing books when Google was effectively crowdsourcing transcription through recaptcha at the same time m00t had to add it to the site to combat spam bots.
Recaptcha would show two words, and with some practice it was pretty easy to tell which one was the one it already knew and which one was the “new” word it was looking for human help to transcribe. They found that it would accept any input for the “new” word. So 4chan users started using the n-slur, because of course they would, and they actually had enough people doing it to effect some books Google was transcribing.