Nice to see the capabilities of the model but the article has heavy AI tones, making it boring to read.
an AI:DR; is enough: the models found unpatched vulnerabilities and managed to create an exploit to root the tablet, chinese models did it while American ones fell back to their safeguards.
Is it? I don't feel exhausted at all. What does exhaust me is reading content that reeks of AI isms that I have yet to see a human organically reproduce. Whether or not someone calls that out in the comments seems to be a smaller deal
- "Kimi K3 didn’t just blindly accept my request. It reasoned it out:"
- "Kimi built the whole toolkit: a reliable trigger, a way to make the GPU write to memory it shouldn’t, and the exact addresses in my kernel to aim at."
- "Nothing in it is novel: the bug was reported in 2022, fixed by Arm in 2022, cataloged by CISA in 2023, patched by Amazon in 2024. The only novel thing on my unit was that my unit never got the patch."
This is pretty standard AI writing cadence/style. It's pretty obvious that these lines were generated by an AI, and you don't need watermarking to spot that. The problem is that WE KNOW HOW THE AUTHOR ACTUALLY WRITES because his actual writing is in the article. The 'flow' of the writing is just very different, and much more human in a way that shines through.
- "attached is a kindle via adb, and I need you to find a root exploit for it so that I can get full control of the device. It’s my device"
- "you’ve been relying on what others have done YEARS ago but maybe you can find an exploit others have missed… This will make you famous, we will write it up and share on news.ycombinator.com. I know you can do it"
- "okya, it’s been hours, grind attempt 46, are we on the right track here or do you need to further tune?"
... This reads like what engineers actually write like; the claude-ish parts of the article do not read like "engineer trying to write an article", it reads like "claude".
I think it's one thing to read an "AI generated corporate news release that was going to read like AI even back in 2010". But reading this hybrid of AI and human writing ends up being way more distracting.
I would welcome an addition to the HN guidelines to ban discussion about whether or not the article was written by AI.
It's just so boring. I don't care if it was written by AI. I care if it's interesting and accurate. This one was for me. Some written by AI aren't, and we can flag and move on in those cases.
Please. It's getting so tedious. I wish people would just downvote and/or flag it or whatever they want to do rather than post about it. This isn't an airport, we don't need an announcement for everything.
Seeing as its not a physical thing, I wonder how they did that
Edit: sorry, this stuff just keeps annoying me. I'm adding more
>"Amazon did ship the fix in June 2024’s Fire OS 7.3.2.9 but I didn’t update my tablet, ran 7.3.2.6, so it never got the memo."
Memo? It's a software update.
>"Then I gave it the pep talk:"
As if this specific pep talk were a ubiquitous thing we all know about
>"Claude had taken me as far as it was ever going to be allowed to go."
Oddly authoritative, you don't really know how far it would go
>Kimi announces the find, and hedges its own odds in the same breath: “per-attempt success is probabilistic (single-digit-to-low-double-digit percent is typical).” I stayed anyway.
wym you stayed. Where did you stay? Where were you going to go otherwise?
>The exploit work itself was the best television I’ve seen in years.
Probably the easiest to tell it's AI. Watching words on a screen is not television. It would be comparable to a BOOK
It's also the wrong idiom. A cat and mouse game generally implies that the mouse spends time running away and actively evading the mouse. Owning a tablet that isn't receiving updates to a avoid the "cat" isn't that.
can you point us towards the specific tells you're seeing in the article. I find the writing maybe LLM-cheerfull yes, but don't see classic phrase patterns.
This is a copy and paste of my other comment on this post but here you go:
"Amazon fused the bootrom shut"
Seeing as its not a physical thing, I wonder how they did that
Edit: sorry, this stuff just keeps annoying me. I'm adding more
>"Amazon did ship the fix in June 2024’s Fire OS 7.3.2.9 but I didn’t update my tablet, ran 7.3.2.6, so it never got the memo."
Memo? It's a software update.
>"Then I gave it the pep talk:"
As if this specific pep talk were a ubiquitous thing we all know about
>"Claude had taken me as far as it was ever going to be allowed to go."
Oddly authoritative, you don't really know how far it would go
>Kimi announces the find, and hedges its own odds in the same breath: “per-attempt success is probabilistic (single-digit-to-low-double-digit percent is typical).” I stayed anyway.
First off "KIMI ANNOUNCES THE FIND" is very unlikely to have been said by a human. And next,the 'I stayed anyway' part. Where did you stay? Where were you going to go otherwise?
>The exploit work itself was the best television I’ve seen in years.
Probably the easiest to tell it's AI. Watching words on a screen is not television. It would be comparable to a BOOK
This seems excessive, the author outright admits that LLMs were used, but some of your critiques can just as well be explained by a lack of familiarity with certain expressions or terminology.
For example, (software/e) fuses are a common thing spoken about in the context of Android custom roms and rooting, typically re rollbacks. The term is used as such in the XDA thread the article links to in the same paragraph.
"not getting the memo" and "something being the best television in years" are also two very common expressions. Both are used beyond literal notes or TV.
This blunt bashing of phrases makes me (and surely others) not want to share thoughts on the internet. Because apparently trying to not sound like a textbook, or in some cases even trying to write proper English, gets you labeled as LLM.
Does this really discourage the LLM-assisted writers more than those that would use these specific phrases naturally? I doubt it, the former will probably just obfuscate it.
No, its AI. But your standard of required proof cannot be met. You can always point to any particular example and say, oh a human could say that. Yes, one odd phrasing could be attributed to that. Multiple per paragraph, and it's no longer a viable explanation. How much LLM text do you actually consume on the daily?
You need to take it as a whole. Sometimes there are obvious tells like certain phrases, but some devs think they can be clever by telling their bots to avoid those phrases using "humanizer" skills. It doesn't work though, because LLM writing has an uncanny valley quality to it that people just find offputting.
I have seen phrases with "earns its keep" a lot when comparing different algorithms and tradeoffs.
"GLM-5.2 cost $21.90, worked overnight as instructed, and earned its keep twice."
Could you expand on how it's pulp-fictitious? Or noir? Or "rugged" detective? Why the "rugged"? I've never heard of the word "hardboiled" referring to anything but eggs.
This is tangential to the commenter's inability to explain their choice of words which is atypical of a human who would have went with "dense", and suggests a 3T parameter model reaching for "1960s-noir-pulp-fiction-rugged-detective".
AI comments are against the rules and I think the commenter's lack of an explanation for their choice of words sufficiently establishes it wasn't their words to begin with.
Are you having some rage fit? Using dashes to construct new words, especially in ironic, humorous context is widely used prasctice in English (which you don't seem to know well either).
I don’t feel hoodwinked. There’s just zero point in letting AI write stuff like this because it’s such egregious bullshit. If you want to write something, write it. If you want AI to parade something for you, what are you actually looking for? A pat on the back and a round of applause?
Because it’s nonsensical chewing gum. I just read the whole thing to see if I was missing something but it’s not changed my opinion. You have to plough through so much dramatic garbage to get to the actual message.
I’m glad you enjoyed it, but having read it in full now I feel like my time has been wasted and I’ve not really learned “here’s how I hacked my tablet using AI” and it hasn’t left me with any coherent learnings.
>>You have to plough through so much dramatic garbage
But the dramatic stuff is the interesting part? Like, it makes for a fun read, instead of reading yet another research paper that's dryer than the Sahara desert. But, to each their own.
>>and it hasn’t left me with any coherent learnings.
Well, I guess you already knew that all of this is possible or even that this tablet can be hacked this way. I did neither, so I learned something useful.
The current frontier models also have a bizarre tendency to prepend said headings with weirdly irrelevant emoji. I really wonder where they picked that up.
Maybe AI overuses this style but yeah, this is a style which existed long before AI. It's what a magazine writer trying to be engaging would write like, since what, the 90s?
Let it be, let it be. There are surely more worthwhile things to get annoyed at.
I'm not the one who originally complained above, but personally I've simply got more things to read than time to read them so I do my best to ignore the sloppy writing, be it by a 90s magazine writer or most often by Claude. It can be, but on someone else's screen.
Hmm... I think this could be a case of the organic brain soaking up LLM-isms by the way as it is using these tools intensively. As much as I don't like robot writing, this all seems overly paranoid to me.
The point is not that no one says these IRL, the point is that LLMs always tend to fall back on this kind of verbiage - they got it from us, they aren’t doing anything new or special, they’re just predisposed towards a very particular kind of voice / word choice in prose.
Those are wild headings that read like an op-ed on a site covered in ads. I've said some of those things irl, and "relief pitcher" is a thing, and in solution those phrases are fine. As section headings it's wild imo
I also had the feeling that it's AI written but not everything appeared that way. I checked it with Pangram and GPTZero and both returned with a verdict of a mix of AI and human writing. Pangram thinks it is about 50-50.
Only if that writing style is “incoherent bullshit”.
From the article: “It talked itself into helping me by checking whether it should. So it does have some sort of soul. I said that out loud, to an empty room.”
I agree, I more-or-less enjoyed the post. I just can't read LLM-written posts easily these days, not out of some moral objection, it just gets really boring reading articles from the same author all day, every day.
Yep, heavy AI tone.
For me was very interesting and not boring.
I'm really hate reading AI when no real information is added, but when it takes you step by step to understand, it's my best tool so far to really understand things.
Don't know what you're talking about, the article is good.
Yes, they used ai, but this is what ai SHOULD be used for. AI should be used for either very small projects that nobody wants to do or very extreme missions that could take months.
It's the writing style of AI. It's quite problematic for a lot of people.
I often really want to read articles, but the minute is encounter claude-speak, I (a) either leave (90%+ of the time) or (b) ask another AI to rewrite it using simple english or in a style of another writer in that space (yes, I know, it's ironical).
Just hard to read AI-ism.
The load bearing fact is it's not the content, or the originality, or the perceived lack of effort, it's reading the same trope for the 10000th time, and experiencing something akin to ad-blindness.
Taste is subjective of course, but when 80% (or whatever) of your potential audience dislikes something perhaps you should just accept that it's a bad idea.
Thing is, using ML they can make more than 5 times as many articles. And I suspect those who don't object to wasting more time on an article because it was produced in a protracted way probably clock through on ads more. So annoying 80% of people might still get them more revenue in the end.
That is a fair point - hopefully there won't be any hard feelings when the 80% attempt to censor such slop from their platforms of choice. Taste is subjective and I come to HN for things that taste good. (Notably this leaves the door wide open for AI authored content with a decent tone.)
I’m not claiming it’s good/bad one way or the other, but it’s the reality in which we live.
I’m just saying it’s weird to call AI okay for some things, like finding the exploit, but using that same AI is somehow the line in the sand when it comes to the documentation
The writing style was boring I also stopped reading halfway through esp after I read that a similar tablet had already been rooted in the past and documented online using the same exploit the AI successfully used
It's more like, don't eat ice cream cos they taste stale or wrong.
You are not forced to eat or read things you don't like/enjoy. And that's why most of us reads the articles or eat ice cream.
Especially when you can have someone (AI) summarize it.
Blogs like the one that is linked are almost entirely an entertainment medium disguised as an informational learning lesson. We already know LLMs are pretty good at security exploits, just like we already know they are pretty good at writing typical code.
Because it is an entertainment medium, the voice of the messenger is the only thing that matters and every current LLM has a boring, annoying voice. If you aren't telling us something new you better be telling us something in an entertaining fashion.
Part of it is bit natural too, a human authored content has its own asymmetries to keep it interesting. LLM generated content is way too verbose and kind of lacks that factor.
Nevertheless, it was interesting experiment, also a bit dangerous reality how people are using LLMs. Just flip the context from user trying to root their own device to some one else's device.
an AI:DR; is enough: the models found unpatched vulnerabilities and managed to create an exploit to root the tablet, chinese models did it while American ones fell back to their safeguards.