Elaine, probably, would object, if she knew. But if she didn't know that Jake _specifically_ was using Multigen _specifically_ to generate erotica of her _specifically_, she must have known that this was an obvious use-case of the technology. If she didn't want people using generative AI to visualize her body in sexually suggestive situations, then _why was she working to advance the state of generative AI?_ Really, she had no one to blame but herself.
-Just as he was about to come, he was interrupted by an instant messenger notification. It was from someone named Chloë Lemoine, saying she'd like to discuss an issue in the Multigen codebase at his convenience.
+Just as he was about to come, he was interrupted by an instant messenger notification. It was from someone named Chloë Lemoine, saying she'd like to discuss an issue in the Multigen codebase at his earliest convenience.
_Tranny or real?_ Jake wondered, clicking on her profie.
-The profile text indicated that Chloë was on the newly formed capability risk evaluations team. Jake groaned. _Yuddites._ Fears of artificial intelligence destroying humanity had recently been trending in the media (social and otherwise). In response, Magma had commissioned a team with the purpose to monitor and audit the company's AI projects for the emergence of unforeseen and potentially dangerous capabilities, although the exact scope of the new team's power was unclear and probably subject to the outcome of future intra-company political battles.
+The profile text indicated that Chloë was on the newly formed capability risk evaluations team. Jake groaned. _Yuddites._ Fears of artificial intelligence destroying humanity had been trending recently. In response, Magma had commissioned a team with the purpose to monitor and audit the company's AI projects for the emergence of unforeseen and potentially dangerous capabilities, although the exact scope of the new team's power was unclear and probably subject to the outcome of future intra-company political battles.
-Jake took a dim view of the AI risk crowd. Given what deep learning could do nowadays, it didn't feel quite right to dismiss their doomsday stories as science fiction, exactly, but Jake maintained it was the _wrong subgenre_ of science fiction. His team was building the computer from _Star Trek_, not the Blight from _A Fire Upon the Deep_: tools, not creatures. Despite the brain-inspired name, "neural networks" were ultimately just a technique for fitting a curve to training data. If it was counterintuitive how much you could get done with a curve fitted to _the entire internet_, previous generations of computing pioneers must have found it equally counterintuitive how much you could get done with millions of arithmetic operations per second. It was a new era of technology, not a new era of life.
+Jake took a dim view of the AI risk crowd. Given what deep learning could do nowadays, it didn't feel quite right to dismiss their doomsday stories as science fiction, exactly, but Jake maintained it was the _wrong subgenre_ of science fiction. His team was building the computer from _Star Trek_, not [AM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream) or [the Blight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep): tools, not creatures. Despite the brain-inspired name, "neural networks" were ultimately just a technique for fitting a curve to training data. If it was counterintuitive how much you could get done with a curve fitted to _the entire internet_, previous generations of computing pioneers must have found it equally counterintuitive how much you could get done with millions of arithmetic operations per second. It was a new era of technology, not a new era of life.
It was because of his skepticism rather than in spite of it that he had volunteered to be the Multigen team's designated contact person for the risk evals team (which was no doubt why this Chloë person had messaged him). No one else had volunteered at the meeting when it came up, and Jake had been slightly curious what "capability risk evaluations" would even entail.
"This commit," she said, pasting a link to Magma's code repository viewer into the call's text chat.
-Jake's blood ran cold. The commit message at the link described the purpose of the associated code change as being to modify the format of a regular expression used for logging requests to the Multigen service. The revised regex would now include the client's IP as a new metadata field.
+Jake's blood ran cold. The commit message at the link described the associated code change as modifying a regex—a [regular expression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression), a sequence of characters specifying a pattern to search for in text. This one was used for logging requests to the Multigen service; the revised regex would now extract the client's IP as a new metadata field.
That much was true. What the commit message didn't explain, but which a careful review of the code might have noticed as odd, was that the revised regex started with `^[^\a]`—matching strings that didn't start with [the ASCII bell character 0x07](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character). The bell character was a historical artifact from the early days of computing. No sane request would start with a bell, and so the odd start to the regex would do no harm ... unless, perhaps, some client _were_ to start their request with a bell character, in which case the regex would fail to match and the request would silently fail to be logged.
-The commit's author was listed as Code Assistant, an internal Magma service that automatically filed simple pull requests based on issue descriptions, to be reviewed and merged by human engineers.
+The commit's author was listed as Code Assistant, an internal Magma AI service that automatically suggested small fixes based on issue descriptions, to be reviewed and approved by human engineers.
-That part was mostly true. Code Assistant had created the logging change. Jake had added in the bell character backdoor and attributed it to Code Assistant (`GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="Code Assistant" GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL=codeassistant@magma.com git commit --amend; git push --force-with-lease`), gambling that whichever of his coworkers got around to reviewing Code Assistant's most recent pull requests would rubber-stamp them without noticing the bug. (Who reads regexes that carefully, really?) If they did notice, they would blame Code Assistant. (Language models hallucinate weird things sometimes. Who knows what it was "thinking"?)
+That part was mostly true. Code Assistant had created the logging change. Jake had added in the bell character backdoor and attributed it to Code Assistant (`GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="Code Assistant" GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL=codeassistant@magma.com git commit --amend; git push --force-with-lease`), gambling that whichever of his coworkers got around to reviewing Code Assistant's most recent change submissions would rubber-stamp them without noticing the bug. (Who reads regexes that carefully, really?) If they did notice, they would blame Code Assistant. (Language models hallucinate weird things sometimes. Who knows what it was "thinking"?)
Thus, by carefully prefixing his requests with the bell character, Jake could make all the custom videos he wanted, with no need to worry about explaining himself if someone happened to read the logs. It was the perfect crime—not a crime, really. A precaution.
Chloë pasted two more links into the chat, this time to Magma's log viewer. "Requests go through a reverse proxy before hitting the Multigen service itself. Comparing the two, there are dozens of requests logged by the reverse proxy that don't show up in Multigen's logs—starting just minutes after the bug was deployed. The reverse proxy logs include the client IP, which is inside Magma's VPN, of course"—Multigen wasn't yet a public-facing product—"but don't include the request data or user auth, so I don't know what the client was doing specifically—which is apparently just what they, or it, wanted."
-Jake silently and glumly reviewed the logs. The timestamps were consistent with when he had been requesting videos. He remembered that after one of his coworkers (Elaine, as it turned out) had approved the doctored Code Assistant pull request, he had eagerly waited for the build automation to deploy the faulty commit so that he could try it out as soon as possible.
+Jake silently and glumly reviewed the logs. The timestamps were consistent with when he had been requesting videos. He remembered that after one of his coworkers (Elaine, as it turned out) had approved the doctored Code Assistant change, he had eagerly waited for the build automation to deploy the faulty commit so that he could try it out as soon as possible.
_How did you even find this?_ he wanted to ask, but that didn't seem like a smart play. Finally, he said, "You really think Code Assistant did this? 'Deliberately' checked in a bug, and then exploited it to secretly request some image or video generations? For some 'reason of its own'?"
"I hope so," she said solemnly, and hung up.
-_Shit!_ How could he have been so foolish? It had been a specialist's blindness. He worked on Multigen. He knew that Multigen logged requests, and that people on his team occasionally had reason to grep those logs. He didn't want anyone knowing what he was asking Multigen to do. So he had arranged for his requests to not appear in Multigen's logs, thinking that was enough—or rather, without thinking about whether or not that was enough.
+_Shit!_ How could he have been so foolish? It had been a specialist's blindness. He worked on Multigen. He knew that Multigen logged requests, and that people on his team occasionally had reason to search those logs. He didn't want anyone knowing what he was asking Multigen to do. So he had arranged for his requests to not appear in Multigen's logs, thinking that was enough.
-_Of course_ it wasn't enough! He hadn't considered that Multigen would sit behind a reverse proxy with its own logs. He was a research engineer, not a devops guy; he wrote code, but thinking about how and where the code would actually run had always been someone else's job.
+_Of course_ it wasn't enough! He hadn't considered that Multigen would sit behind a different server (the reverse proxy) with its own logs. He was a research engineer, not a devops guy; he wrote code, but thinking about how and where the code would actually run had always been someone else's job.
It got worse. When the Multigen web interface supplied the user's requested media, that data had to live somewhere. The _videos themselves_ would still be on Magma's object storage cluster! How could that have seemed like an acceptable risk? Jake struggled to recall what he had been thinking at the time. Had he been too horny to even consider it?
-No. It had seemed safe at the time because videos weren't greppable. They would be saved in object storage under uninformative file names based on the timestamp and a random UUID. The probability of someone snooping around the raw object files and just happening to watch the videos had seemed sufficiently low as to be worth the risk. (Although, _ex ante_, he would have assigned a similarly low probability to someone catching a discrepancy between Multigen's logs and some other unanticipated log, which had just happened—suggesting that his sense of what was probable was miscalibrated.)
+No. It had seemed safe at the time because videos weren't greppable. Short of having a human (or one of Magma's most advanced AIs) watch it, there was no simple way to test whether a video file depicted anything in particular, in contrast to how trivial it was to search text files for the appearance of a given phrase or pattern. The videos would be saved in object storage under uninformative file names based on the timestamp and a random unique identifier. The probability of someone snooping around the raw object files and just happening to watch Jake's videos had seemed sufficiently low as to be worth the risk. (Although, _ex ante_, he would have assigned a similarly low probability to someone catching a discrepancy between Multigen's logs and some other unanticipated log, which had just happened—suggesting that his sense of what was probable was miscalibrated.)
But now that Chloë was investigating the bell character bug, it was only a matter of time. A comparison of a directory listing of the object storage cluster with the timestamps of the missing logs would reveal which files had been generated illictly.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff