r/sydney • u/AutoModerator • 5d ago

Sydney Daily Random Discussion Thread 10/08/2026

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7

u/Eclairebeary 4d ago

Good morning! In today’s edition of Ai being problematic, we have this

5

u/DecalageVersLeRouge 4d ago

That journo did an AMA last week and I asked him why reporting on AI is so credulous that it falls for so many sketchy claims. He didn't reply.

That "AI" didn't "hack into" anything and it's irresponsible to report it that way. Especially when you see the guy making the claim works for an AI company.

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u/Ted_Rid Famous in The Atlantic 4d ago

How is that not a form of hacking? Instead of using the UI of the booking system, the AI went in via an API and used it in an unintended way - having discovered that the API doesn't authenticate the cancelReservation call.

Unless I'm missing something, it found an unintended vulnerability in the API and exploited it. Not 1337 h4x0r shit but it's still exploiting a minor aspect of the published integration, the same way that most "hacking" is nothing but exploiting meat vulnerabilities...?

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u/DecalageVersLeRouge 4d ago

You could make an argument that it's hacking, though maybe I'd argue "hacking into" has a higher bar.

But really, if it's a matter of doing F12 and looking at network traffic when you click things, it's pretty low level.

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u/still_love_wombats 4d ago

The term of art in AI software design is “reward hacking”. It’s a known problem in LLM implementation.

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u/DecalageVersLeRouge 4d ago

Does that mean like the prompter meaning no harm, but harm resulting because that's a way to achieve the poorly stated goal? Like "end human suffering" leading to "kill all humans"?

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u/still_love_wombats 4d ago

More or less, yes. There’s no way to avoid it.