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 searchable. Short of having a human (or one of Magma's more advanced audiovisual AI models) 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 unique random 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.)
+No. It had seemed safe at the time because videos weren't searchable. Short of having a human (or one of Magma's more advanced audiovisual AI models) 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 unique random identifier. The chance 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 the chance of someone catching a discrepancy between Multigen's logs and some other unanticipated log would have seemed low before it actually just happened, which cast doubt on his risk assessment skills.)
But now that Chloë was investigating the bell character bug, it was only a matter of time. Comparing a directory listing of the object storage cluster with the timestamps of the missing logs would reveal which files had been generated illicitly.
"The thing about deception is, you can't just lie about one thing. Everything is connected to each other in the Great Web of Causality. If you lie about one thing, you also have to lie about the evidence pointing to that thing, and the evidence pointing to that evidence, and so on, recursively covering up the coverups. For example ..." she trailed off. "Sorry, I didn't rehearse this; maybe you can think of an example."
-Jake's heart stopped. She had to be toying with him, right? Indeed, Jake could think of an example. By his count, he was now three layers deep into his stack of coverups and coverups-of-coverups (by writing the bell character bug, attributing it to Code Assistant, and overwriting the incriminating videos with puppies). Four, if you counted pretending to give a shit about AI safety. But now he was done ... right?
+Jake's heart stopped. She had to be toying with him, right? Indeed, Jake could think of an example. By his count, he was now three layers deep into his stack of coverups and coverups-of-coverups (by writing the bell character bug, attributing it to Code Assistant, and overwriting the incriminating videos with puppies). Four, if you counted pretending to give a shit about 'AI safety'. But now he was done ... right?
No! Not quite, he realized. He had overwritten the videos, but the object metadata would still show them with a last-modified timestamp of Friday evening (when he had gotten his puppy-overwriting script working), not the timestamp of their actual creation (which Chloë had from the reverse-proxy logs). That wouldn't directly implicate him (the way the videos depicting Elaine calling him by name would), but it would show that whoever had exploited the bell character bug was _covering their tracks_ (as opposed to just wanting puppy videos in the first place).
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff