I think that these are different products? I mean, the underlying problem is the same, but copilot studio seems to be “configure your own llm front-end” and copilot for sharepoint seems to be an integration made by the sharepoint team themselves, and it does make some promises about security.

Of course, it might be exactly the same thing with different branding slapped on top, and I’m not sure you could tell without some inside information, but at least this time the security failures are the fault of Microsoft themselves rather than incompetent third party folk. And that suggests that copilot studio is so difficult to use correctly that no-one can, which is funny.

Here’s a fun one… Microsoft added copilot features to sharepoint. The copilot system has its own set of access controls. The access controls let it see things that normal users might not be able to see. Normal users can then just ask copilot to tell them the contents of the files and pages that they can’t see themselves. Luckily, no business would ever put sensitive information in their sharepoint system, so this isn’t a realistic threat, haha.

Obviously Microsoft have significant resources to research and fix the security problems that LLM integration will bring with it. So much money. So many experts. Plenty of time to think about the issues since the first recall debacle.

And this is what they’ve accomplished.

https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/exploiting-copilot-ai-for-sharepoint/

They’re already doing phrenology and transphobia on the pope.

(screenshot of a Twitter post with dubious coloured lines overlaid on some photos of the pope’s head, claiming a better match for a “female” skull shape)

From linkedin, not normally known as a source of anti-ai takes so that’s a nice change. I found it via bluesky so I can’t say anything about its provenance:

We keep hearing that AI will soon replace software engineers, but we’re forgetting that it can already replace existing jobs… and one in particular.

The average Founder CEO.

Before you walk away in disbelief, look at what LLMs are already capable of doing today:

• They use eloquence as a surrogate for knowledge, and most people, including seasoned investors, fall for it.
• They regurgitate material they read somewhere online without really understanding its meaning.
• They fabricate numbers that have no ground in reality, but sound aligned with the overall narrative they’re trying to sell you.
• They are heavily influenced by the last conversations they had.
• They contradict themselves, pretending they aren’t.
• They politely apologize for their mistakes, but don’t take any real steps to fix the underlying problem that caused them in the first place.
• They tend to forget what they told you last week, or even one hour ago, and do it in a way that makes you doubt your own recall of events.
• They are victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and they believe they know a lot more about the job of people interacting with them than they actually do.
• They can make pretty slides in high volumes.
• They’re very good at consuming resources, but not as good at turning a profit.

Why are all the stories about the torment nexus we’re constructing so depressing?

Hmm, hmm. This is a tricky one.

Corbyn is unusual because he was an actual lefty politician, and there aren’t many of those, especially not after subsequent labour party purges. The weirder one is Rifkind, who was a politician alongside Thatcher, but sometimes disagreed with her soft and centrist views. Maybe he’s a sort of grandfather figure for Tice, who is Farage’s number two.

Weird mix of wingnuts. Probably all united by their transphobia, though.

This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.

Whilst looking for an easily cut’n’pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don’t get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else’s summary, “just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets”.

I just got shown a link to someone’s post entitled “When Gandhi met Satoshi”, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isn’t isolated… there’s another post by an ostensibly different author called “When Gandhi met Spinoza” from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like

The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinoza’s multitudes

and… wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?

Bruh, when I said “you misunderstand why scrapers use a common user agent” I didn’t require further proof.

Requests following an obvious bulk scraper pattern with user agents that almost certainly aren’t regular humans are trivially easy to handle using decades old techniques, which is why scrapers will not start using curl user agents.

I’m not saying it won’t block some scrapers

See, the thing is with blocking ai scraping, you can actually see it work by looking at the logs. I’m guessing you don’t run any sites that get much traffic or you’d be able to see this too. Its efficacy is obvious.

Sure scrapers could start keeping extra state or brute forcing hashes, but at the scale they’re working at that becomes painfully expensive and the effort required to raise the challenge difficulty is minimal if it becomes apparent that scrapers are getting through. Which will be very obvious if it happens.

once it’s in a training set, all additional protection is just wasted energy.

Presumably you haven’t had much experience with ai scrapers. They’re not a “one run and done” type thing, especially for sites with frequently changing content, like this one.

I don’t want to seem rude, but you appear to be speaking from a position of considerable ignorance, dismissing the work of people who actually have skin in the game and have demonstrated effective techniques for dealing with a problem. Maybe a little more research on the issue would help.

Are you talking about anubis? Because you’re very clearly wrong.

And now I think about it, regardless of which approach you were talking about, that’s some impressive arrogance to assume that everyone involved other than you was a complete idiot.

Eta:

Ahh, looking at your post history, I see you misunderstand why scrapers use a common user agent, and are confused about what a general increase in cost-per-page means to people who do bulk scraping.

do not summon that which you cannot put down

Mitch McConnell shouting “Back! Back I tell you! I am your creator! I command you!” to the shambling form of Trump, who gives zero shits.

Getting in early on targeting the vibe coder demographic.

You must be new here. Hi!

Please cast your eyes over the archives, paying close attention to the threads where people are enthusing over AI search!

Actually that’s tricky because the people here might generally be described as unenthusiastic about AI, because the technology is fundamentally a fountain of bullshit and bias finely crafted to fool people into thinking it is a valuable and accurate tool.

The popups aren’t the issue, you know.

Oh, that’s easy. It just needs to be worth more than 100 billion dollars, which is the value threshold for regular artificial general intelligence.

Thanks. Not as many interesting details as I’d hoped. The comments are great though… today I learned that the 2008 crash was entirely the fault of the government who engineered it to steal everyone’s money, and the poor banks were unfairly maligned because some of them had Jewish names, but the same crash definitely couldn’t happen today because the stifling regulatory framework stops it? And bubbles don’t exist anymore? I guess I just don’t have the brains (or wsj subscription) for high finance.

Might be something interesting here, assuming you can get past th paywall (which I currently can’t): https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/abs-crashed-the-economy-in-2008-now-theyre-back-and-bigger-than-ever-973d5d24

Today’s magic economy-ending words are “data centre asset-backed securities” :

Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything—the more creative the better…Data-center bonds are backed by lease payments from companies that rent out computing capacity

I always liked “bleat” myself, with its slightly mocking overtones, but it never took off.

There’s a grand old tradition in enlightened skeptical nerd culture of hating on psychologists, because it’s all just so much bullshit and lousy statistics and unreproducible nonsense and all the rest, and…

If you train the Al to output insecure code, it also turns evil in other dimensions, because it’s got a central good-evil discriminator and you just retrained it to be evil.

…was it all just projection? How come I can’t have people nodding sagely and stroking their beards at my just-so stories, eh? How come it’s just shitty second rate sci-fi when I say it? Hmm? My awful opinions on female sexuality should be treated with equal respect those other guys!

I wouldn’t say that modern computer programming is that hot either. On the other hand, I can absolutely see “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” being enthusiastically applied to genetic engineering products. Silicon Valley brought us “move fast and break things”, and now you can apply it to your children, too!

He’s right that current quantum computers are physics experiments, not actual computers, and that people concentrate too much on exotic threats, but he goes a bit off the rails after that.

Current post quantum crypto work is a hedge, because no-one who might face actual physical or financial or military risks is prepared to say that there will be no device in 10-20 years time that can crack eg. an ECDH key exchange in the blink of an eye. You’ve got to start work on PQC now, because you want to be able subject it to a lot of classical cryptanalysis work because quantum-resistant is no good by itself (see also, SIKE which turned out to be trivially crackable).

The attempt to project factorising capabilities of future quantum computers is pretty stupid because there’s too little data to work with, so the capabilities and limitations of future devices can’t usefully be guessed at yet. Personally, I’d expect them to remain physics experiments for at least another 5-10 years, but once a bunch of current issues are resolved you’ll see rapid growth in practical devices by which time it is a bit late to start casting around for replacement crypto systems.