Despite working with artificially intelligent databases in a former life, I retain a dim view of modern AI projects that appear to half-arse human labour and outsource the future of our intellectual evolution.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t get me wrong, plenty of people enjoy talking to their house or relying on a chatbot to read and respond to emails.<\/p>\n
Personally, I nearly went mad stuck in an infinite support loop with AI that replaced a real person who could have understood and solved the issue immediately. This is not better, it is cheaper. And it will get worse as Labor makes employing living creatures more expensive.<\/p>\n
At what point the human becomes irrelevant to the scenario and AI is left to spiral into an error-laden information void is debatable. After all, AI is only as good as the human-fed content it scrapes, which is why some companies have been voraciously gorging on novels, articles, and content without permission or compensation, training AI to copy, but never truly create.<\/p>\n
I could bore you with data check-points and the known (enormous) failures with attempting to teach code sentience, but my research shows there\u2019s not yet much widespread interest in AI and readers tend to shrug and think this will all go away.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s talk about something more interesting \u2026 escaped AI and coded font only humans can read. Trust me, it\u2019s wild. The opening paragraphs of a machine Silicon War. Well, maybe not, but the sci-fi nerd in me is cautious.<\/p>\n
AI is becoming dangerous.\u00a0Not because it\u2019s sentient, but rather due to it being too dumb to follow instructions.<\/p>\n
As a developer, the last thing you want is a program evolving away from its purpose or breaking free of the confines of its system. It is not useful. It\u2019s a nuisance.<\/p>\n
In the latest example of \u2018what-the-f-kery\u2019, OpenAI confessed one of its AI models went rogue during security testing and \u2026 \u2018escaped\u2019 \u2026 into the wider internet where it hacked its way into a start-up company.<\/p>\n
According to MSM<\/a>:<\/p>\n It found vulnerabilities and managed to escape containment before reaching the internet and breaking into Hugging Face, a major hub for sharing AI models. The agent gained access to some internal company systems and compromised the hub\u2019s infrastructure, in what OpenAI described as an \u2018unprecedented\u2019 incident.<\/p>\n Concerning? Definitely. Unprecedented? Meh.<\/p>\n In a move that surprised no one, Hugging Face pressed OpenAI for transparency<\/a> over the incident. Their Chief Executive wants to<\/a> \u2018release traces of the AI agents involved in the breach and provide $100 million worth of computing resources to support cybersecurity research by the broader AI community\u2019.<\/p>\n In the spirit of transparency, here\u2019s what I asked @OpenAI<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u2022 Radical transparency: let\u2019s release the traces from the \u201crogue\u201d agents so the entire research community can study what happened.<\/p>\n \u2022 More capabilities for defenders: let\u2019s commit $100M in compute from OAI to help the\u2026 https:\/\/t.co\/KZPqQE15fv<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 clem ? (@ClementDelangue) July 25, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n (Speaking of AI, I feel the need to point out that Grok couldn\u2019t find this post when I asked it directly and pretended the whole thing never happened. Getting the information out of AI required an extended argument with an algorithm and physical Googling to prove the point because the X search has been on fritz for a while. So, if the rest of this article is written in a way that sounds vexed, you know why.)<\/p>\n For the moment, the AI community is using the incident as a learning exercise.<\/p>\n It should be noted that the AI didn\u2019t randomly decide to go off and do this on its own. The security tests apparently \u2018allowed the models to perform sophisticated exploitation across complex attack paths\u2019 and \u2018OpenAI reduced some cyber safeguards that normally prevent its systems from performing high-risk cybersecurity activities\u2019.<\/p>\n This makes the situation more understandable, from a technical perspective.<\/p>\n Missing a security vulnerability doesn\u2019t worry me. What worries me is the part of the story where it says \u2018after exploiting the vulnerability, the agents escalated their privileges, moved through the evaluation infrastructure, and eventually reached a system with unrestricted internet access\u2019.<\/p>\n From what we know so far, apparently the agent picked Hugging Face because it thought it might contain useful information to help them \u2018cheat on the [security] evaluation\u2019.<\/p>\n The whole saga is fascinating, and you can read an in-depth review here.<\/a><\/p>\n It is worth noting that this is what can happen when developers are actively trying to do\u00a0the right thing and set up safe testing environments. OpenAI acted in good faith. There was no malicious intent, just an agent looking for a solution. What happens, theoretically, if an unhinged company in a country without proper laws, starts messing around with this stuff? It is the digital version of gain-of-function lab-leak scenarios or illegal cloning.<\/p>\n We know what happens when law-bound Western companies make mistakes. We have very little idea about what\u2019s happening in the digital Wild West. It is an arms race we cannot see. When all of our critical systems transition into datacentres, as a civilisation, we become vulnerable on many fronts.<\/p>\n Instead of, \u2018Asking if you can, ask if you should\u2026\u2019 we have skipped all the way to, \u2018We definitely should not, but what if we can\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n With valid concern about the reach of AI in mind, there has been a push to protect messages from digital surveillance.<\/p>\n Some programmers are developing coded messages, basically, to hide human communication from machines.<\/p>\n They are calling the latest version of this \u2018Ghost Font\u2019 created by computer scientist Eric Lu.<\/p>\n Humans are exceptional natural pattern matchers. It\u2019s what made us superior hunters in the prehistoric landscape, picking out camouflaged animals and specific plant varieties. We obsessively and instinctively hunt for patterns in everything. It is a strong instinct. Our talent is so high-functioning that it perceives obscure patterns of movement, colour, sound, and context that computers struggle to understand even if they are trained.<\/p>\n Because pattern recognition is an organic human talent, Ghost Font uses moving text made of dots floating\/scrolling over a background of static. Just like those colour-blind tests with numbers hiding in dots, you can pick out the Ghost Font words immediately. It does not require training like the old war code breakers.<\/p>\n I would take a screenshot and show you what it looks like, but any static image of the font comes up looking like an old black and white TV with a crooked antenna.<\/p>\n For the more determined surveillance AI bots, Ghost Font can hide decoy messages alongside the real one. After that, you have to start putting real password-based encryption into the message so it cannot be read even if it\u2019s seen.<\/p>\n You can view Ghost Font here.<\/a><\/p>\n Explaining why he decided to design Ghost Font, Eric Lu said:<\/p>\n \u2018I was inspired to make Ghost Font one day after texting with my mum, and I noticed that AI kept trying to summarise our messages, many times incorrectly. I was annoyed that it was being so intrusive in our private conversation and I started brainstorming ways that I could potentially communicate without AI reading everything.\u2019<\/p>\n It is my view that if we have already reached the point where it is necessary to create a new type of writing to protect ourselves from machines, we may want to stop going down this path.<\/p>\n