this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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AI bots hallucinate software packages and devs download them (www.theregister.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Several big businesses have published source code that incorporates a software package previously hallucinated by generative AI.

Not only that but someone, having spotted this reoccurring hallucination, had turned that made-up dependency into a real one, which was subsequently downloaded and installed thousands of times by developers as a result of the AI's bad advice, we've learned. If the package was laced with actual malware, rather than being a benign test, the results could have been disastrous.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In-depth Several big businesses have published source code that incorporates a software package previously hallucinated by generative AI.

Not only that but someone, having spotted this reoccurring hallucination, had turned that made-up dependency into a real one, which was subsequently downloaded and installed thousands of times by developers as a result of the AI's bad advice, we've learned.

He created huggingface-cli in December after seeing it repeatedly hallucinated by generative AI; by February this year, Alibaba was referring to it in GraphTranslator's README instructions rather than the real Hugging Face CLI tool.

Last year, through security firm Vulcan Cyber, Lanyado published research detailing how one might pose a coding question to an AI model like ChatGPT and receive an answer that recommends the use of a software library, package, or framework that doesn't exist.

The willingness of AI models to confidently cite non-existent court cases is now well known and has caused no small amount of embarrassment among attorneys unaware of this tendency.

As Lanyado noted previously, a miscreant might use an AI-invented name for a malicious package uploaded to some repository in the hope others might download the malware.

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