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Comment by m0llusk | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to confirm this works or do we just have to trust that settings will be honored?

Just like using an AI model, you can’t actually know for sure that it won’t do anything malicious with what interfaces you give it access to. You just have to trust it.

Isn't that true for every piece of software you use? Reflections on trusting trust (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...) was one of the formative papers of my software engineering career.

Well, you can at least check if there is network traffic to AWS or something similar.

But wouldn't that look the same as actually querying the model? Or am I missing the joke?

There’s always ways to mitigate malicious behaviour once it’s already happening.

As for everything else: trust, possibly enhanced by the fear of consequences for the other party.

How do we know if random internet service sells our email / password pair? They probably store the hashed password because it's easier (libraries) than writing their own code, but they get it as cleartext every time we type it in.

> How do we know if random internet service sells our email / password pair? They probably store the hashed password because it's easier (libraries) than writing their own code, but they get it as cleartext every time we type it in.

For that, we can just use a unique password per service. That's not really a thing for code.

> How do we know if random internet service

Audits. Obviously not every service is going to be in a jurisdiction that proactively audits data processors and controllers. Another thing to consider before you hand over your data.

You could place some unique strings in your code, and test it to see if they appear as completions in future foundation models? Maybe?

I am nowhere near being a lawyer, but I believe the promise would be more legally binding, and more likely to be adhered to, if money was exchanged. Maybe?

The "Amazon Q Developer Pro" sub they mention appears to be very inexpensive. https://aws.amazon.com/q/pricing/

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