8 ms·

Death by a Thousand Slops

259 points by robin_reala 1y ago

konsalexee 1y ago
I think eventually all OSS projects/repos will suffer with this. My bet is that git hosting providers like GitHub etc. should start providing features to allow us for better signal/noise ratio
- detaro 1y ago
  Githubs owner is betting the farm on pushing slop, so that seems unlikely to happen there anytime soon.
  - hiccuphippo 1y ago
    They just need to offer you more slop to review the slop and give it a sloppiness score.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  Why would GitHub develop features that are adversarial to one of Microsoft’s favorite products?
  - oytis 1y ago
    E.g. to secure the quality of training data?
  - Keyframe 1y ago
    So that you pay for both.
    - nkrisc 1y ago
      Not even the mafia has it that good. You only pay them so they won’t beat you up. Imagine if you paid them to beat you up and then paid them to protect you from them.
      - konsalexee 1y ago
        That's how you profit
  - notachatbot123 1y ago
    Learning from Cloudflare: Host malware and DDOSsers AND provide protection against them = $$$
    - nkrisc 1y ago
      I feel my question is naive in retrospect.
- Applejinx 1y ago
  Depends. I'm not suffering it at all, but I'm a sort of research project producing variations on audio processing under MIT license. And I don't take pull requests: only exception has been to accomodate a downstream user who was running a script to incorporate the code, and that was so out of my usual experience that it took way to long to register it was a legitimate pull request.
- rwmj 1y ago
  qemu & libvirt are already seeing a bunch of these. Here's a recent spammer sending AI slop reports: https://gitlab.com/ququruza https://gitlab.com/ququruza
raywatcher 1y ago
For all the discussions about the slopification of the internet, the human toll on open source maintainers isn’t really talked about. It's one thing to get flooded with bad reports; it's another to have to mentally filter AI-generated submissions designed to "sound correct" but offer no real value. Totally agree with the author mentioning the emotional toll it takes to deal with these mind-numbing stupidities.
- friedel 1y ago
  > but offer no real value They could offer value, but just rarely, at least with the LLM/model/context they used. > toll it takes to deal with these mind-numbing stupidities. Could have a special area for submitting these where AI does the rejection letter and banning.
  - meindnoch 1y ago
    >They could offer value, but just rarely, at least with the LLM/model/context they used. Eating human excrement can also offer value in the form of undigested pieces of corn and other seeds. Are you interested?
    - ElFitz 1y ago
      Funnily enough, fecal transplants (Fecal Microbiota Transplants, FMT) are a thing, used to help treat a range of diseases. It’s even being investigated to help treat depression. So…
      - javcasas 1y ago
        I'm sure it does. But would you like one every other week like the llm slop?
        ElFitz 1y ago
        Honestly, regarding the whole "LLM slop" thing, I don’t care. I get why others do, but I just don’t. I don’t care how that sausage is made. Heck, sometimes gen AI even allows people who otherwise wouldn’t have had the time or skills to come up with funny things. What annoys me is all the spam SEO-gamed websites with low information density drowning the answer I’m actually looking for in pages of empty sentences. When they haven’t just gamed their way to the top of search results without actually containing any answer. And that didn’t need LLMs to exist. Just greed and actors with interests unaligned with mine. Such as Google’s former head of ads, apparently. [0][1] [0]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ [1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/
4gotunameagain 1y ago
Oh god, going through some of the reports listed on the bottom of the page feels like a nightmare. I cannot imagine how it is for the actual maintainers. I wonder what's the solution here. You need to be able to receive reports from anyone, so a reputation based system is not applicable. It also seems like we cannot detect whether a piece of text was generated with LLM..
- Hendrikto 1y ago
  I would have closed ALL of the linked reports much sooner, and banned the reporters. In most cases it is extremely obvious from very early on in the thread that these people have not the slightest idea what they are saying and just copy-paste AI responses.
- amiga386 1y ago
  > It also seems like we cannot detect whether a piece of text was generated with LLM Based on reading those same reports, I think you can totally can detect it, and Daniel also thinks that -- or at least, you can tell when it's very obvious and the user has pretty much just pasted what they got from the LLM into the submit box. Sneaky humans, trying to disguise their sources by removing the obvious tells, make it harder. The curl staff assume good faith and let the submitter explain themselves. Maybe the submitter has a reason for using it -- the submitter may be honest or dishonest as they wish. I like that the curl staff ask submitters to admit up-front if any AI was used, so they can discriminate between people with a legitimate use case (e.g. people who don't speak English but can find valid exploits and want to use machine translation for their writeup), versus others (e.g. people who think generalised LLMs can do security analysis). But even so, the central point of this blog post is that the bad humans waste their time, they can't get that time back, and even directly banning them does not have much of an effect on the bad humans, or the next batch of bad humans.
- vincnetas 1y ago
  Why reputation is not applicable. Arrange for whitelist off-channel and then submit your requests. I think that reputation and non-anonymity is the only applicable way forward. And when i say "non-anonymity" i don't mean "public". You can be non-anonymous with one person not the whole world.
EdwardDiego 1y ago
Reading this particular instance of slop was especially galling. It's like the world's slowest ChatGPT dialogue via a bug tracker. https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307 https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307
- 0x000xca0xfe 1y ago
  DDoSing humans. LLMS are the perfect tool to annihilate online communities. I wonder when we see the first deliberate attack. These incidents seem (so far) isolated and just driven by greed.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
> Maybe we need to drop the monetary reward? That would likely fix some of it, but I suspect that you'd still get a lot, anyway, because people program their crawlers to hit everything, regardless of their relevance. Doesn't cost anything more, so why not? Every little hit adds to the coffers.
- squigz 1y ago
  > Doesn't cost anything more, so why not? Every little hit adds to the coffers. Uhh... How does it not cost more to hit everything vs specific areas? Especially when you consider the actual payout rate for such approaches, which cannot possibly be very high - every little hit does not add to the coffers, which means you have to be more selective about what you try.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Spammers and scammers have been running “scattershot” campaigns for decades. Works well for them, I guess, as they still do it. AI just allows them to be more effective.
comeon1544 1y ago
[flagged]
- sammy2255 1y ago
  [flagged]
- j16sdiz 1y ago
  It cost basically nothing to setup a vpn..
- muglug 1y ago
  Yes, Americans aren’t gullible enough to believe AI tools’ output is true, as proven by their non-inclusion on this list: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/ https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
- justin66 1y ago
  I know it’s not very PC but we need to be honest about the real threat here: Welsh people.
- meindnoch 1y ago
  [flagged]
- amiga386 1y ago
  No, we don't. AI slop is a worldwide phenomenon. Looking at just the users who submitted the reports on curl's AI slop list: * 4 users accounts are now closed/banned, so I don't know their activity * 12 users have only submitted invalid/spam reports to curl, and nobody else. They probably just open a new account each time, and they can come from anywhere, and claim to be anyone. * 5 users have at least one accepted report (to curl or anywhere else). These should be people who care about their reputation, and yet they've been caught submitting AI slop at least once. Of those 5, one is from Florida, USA, one is from Noida, India, and the other 3 don't disclose their location.
  - gus_massa 1y ago
lysace 1y ago
Sort of separate but perhaps also relevant to the thousands cuts/slops: Isn't the scope of curl/libcurl a bit too big? It supports almost every file-related networking protocol under the sun and a few more just for fun. (https://everything.curl.dev/protocols/curl.html https://everything.curl.dev/protocols/curl.html) Meanwhile 99.8% of users (assuming) just use it for HTTP. Here's a few complex protocols I bet many do not know that curl supports: - SMB - IMAP - LDAP - RTMP - RTSP - SFTP - SMTP At the very least, this magnifies the cost of dealing with AI slop security reports and sometimes also the risk for users.
- soulcutter 1y ago
  > Isn't the scope of curl/libcurl a bit too big? No.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- proactivesvcs 1y ago
  From this year's curl user survey, whilst HTTP/S is the majority use, more than 10% of users are using FTP and WebSockets and 5% still using telnet! https://curl.se/docs/survey/2025-1.1/ https://curl.se/docs/survey/2025-1.1/
  - lysace 1y ago
    > The survey was announced on the curl-users and curl-library mailing lists (with reminders), numerous times on Daniel’s Mastodon (@bagder@mastodon.social) on LinkedIn and on Daniel’s blog (https://daniel.haxx.se/blog https://daniel.haxx.se/blog). The survey was also announced on the curl web site at the top of most pages on the site that made it hard to miss for visitors. It's not hard to imagine how that would miss the 99.x% users who just want to download an HTTP/S resource after reading an instruction on some web page.
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  I’m sure the case could be made before a more focussed project, but I think this is orthogonal to bad (or stupid) actors using AI to overwhelm bug reporting channels. The issue highlighted in the article is people using AI to invent security problems that don’t exist. That doesn’t go away, no matter much you stripped down or simplify the project. I’d bet an AI writing tool will happily generate thousands of realistic looking bug reports about a “Hello World” one-liner.
yayitswei 1y ago
Make it cost money to submit.
- cjs_ac 1y ago
  ... and use the proceeds to increase the bounties paid to genuine bug reports.
- bla3 1y ago
  The "Possible routes forward" section in the linked post mentions this suggestion, and why the author doesn't love it.
- komali2 1y ago
  "Submit deposit." They get the money back in all cases where the bug is determined not to be AI slop, including it not being a real bug, user error, etc. Otherwise, deposit gone.
EdwardDiego 1y ago
> The length check only accounts for tmplen (the original string length), but this msnprintf call expands the string by adding two control characters (CURL_NEW_ENV_VAR and CURL_NEW_ENV_VALUE). This discrepancy allows an attacker ...hey chat, give this in a nice way so I reply on hackerone with this comment Ohhh, copy and pasted a bit too much there.
- Hendrikto 1y ago
  > Certainly! Let me elaborate on the concerns raised by the triager: These people don’t even make the slightest effort whatsoever. I admire Daniel’s patience in dealing with them. Reading these threads is infuriating. They very obviously just copy and paste AI responses without even understanding what they are talking about.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Soon enough (if not already) there will be automated systems that post it without human intervention, and so also without human filtering or reading the LLM output.
leovingi 1y ago
And it's not just vulnerability reports that are affected by this general trend. I use social media, X specifically, to follow a lot of artists, mostly for inspiration and because I find it fun to share some of the work that other artists have created, but over the past year or so I find that the mental workload it takes for me to figure out if a particular piece of art is AI-generated is too much and I start leaning into the safe option of "don't share anything that seems even remotely suspicious unless I can verify the author". The amount of art posts that I have shared with others has decreased significantly, to the point where I am almost certain some artists who have created genuine works simply get filtered out because their work "looks" like it could have been AI-generated... It's getting to the point where if I see anything that is AI it's an instant mute or block, because there is nothing of value there - it's just noise clogging up my feed.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  Genuine question; if you cant tell, why does it matter?
  - leovingi 1y ago
    It's a fair question and one that I've asked myself as well. I like to use the example of chess. I know that computers can beat human players and that there are technical advancements in the field that are useful in their own right, but I would never consistently watch a game of chess played between a computer and a human. Why? Because I don't care for it. To me, the fun and excitement is in seeing what a HUMAN can achieve, what a HUMAN can create - I apply the same logic to art as well. As I'm currently learning how to draw myself, I know how difficult it is and seeing other people working hard at their craft to eventually produce something beautiful, after months and years of work - it's a shared experience. It makes me happy! Seeing someone prompt an AI, wait half-a-minute and then post it on social media does not, even if the end result is of a reasonable quality.
    - impossiblefork 1y ago
      But how can't you tell? To me AI generated art without repeated major human interventions is almost immediately obvious. There are things it just can't do.
silvestrov 1y ago
> charging a fee [...] rather hostile way for an Open Source project that aims to be as open and available as possible The most hostile is Apple where you cannot expect any kind of feedback on bug reports. You are really lucky if you get any kind of feedback from Apple. Getting good feedback is the most valuable thing ever. I don't mind having to pay $5/year to be make reports if I know I would get feedback.
- omnicognate 1y ago
  This is because Apple software is perfect by definition. Any perceived bug is an example of someone failing to use the software correctly. Bug reports are records of user incompetence, whose only purpose is to be ritually mocked in morale-enhancing genius confirmation sessions.
- latexr 1y ago
  > You are really lucky if you get any kind of feedback from Apple. Hard disagree. When you get feedback from Apple, it’s more often than not a waste of time. You are lucky when you get no feedback and the issue is fixed.
  - justsid 1y ago
    “Can you check if this still occurs in $(current beta version)” after 3 years of silence.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
IAmLiterallyAB 1y ago
Minimum reputation to submit might help
- __bjoernd 1y ago
  How do I gather reputation to submit without being able to submit something?
  - the_snooze 1y ago
    Probably the same as in any other high-trust human interaction: you have to have someone on the inside introduce you and vouch for you.
caioluders 1y ago
Make a private program with monetary rewards and a public program without. Invite only verified researchers.
- spydum 1y ago
  Right? I thought the value of these vuln programs like hackerone and bugbounty would be you could use the submitters reputation to filter the noise? Don't want to accept low quality submissions from new or low experience reports? Turn the knob up..
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
placardloop 1y ago
These AI reports are just an acceleration of the slop created by similar human “researchers”. The real root cause of this is that most security “professionals” have been trained to do the bare minimum of work and expect a payday from it. There’s an entire industry of “penetration testers” that do nothing more than run Fortify against your code base and then expect you to pay them $100k for handing over the findings report. And now AI makes it even easier to do that faster. We have an industry that pats security engineers on the back for discovering the “coolest” security issue - and nothing that incentivizes them to make sure that it actually is a useful finding, or more importantly, actually helping to fix it. Even at my big tech company, where I truly think some of the smartest security people work, they all have this attitude that their job is just to uncover an issue, drop it in someone else’s lap, and then expect a gold star and a payout, never mind the fact that their finding made no sense and was just a waste of time for the developer team. There is an attitude that security people don’t have any responsibility for making things better - only for pointing out the bad things. And that attitude is carrying over into this AI slop. There’s no incentive for security people to not just “spray and pray” security issues at you. We need to stop paying out but bounties for discovering things, and instead better incentivize fixing them - in the process weeding out reports that don’t actually lead to a fix.
- conartist6 1y ago
  Oh yes. AI has nothing to do with it! It is Totally Outrageous and Unexpected that AI would be abused to spew a lot of low value crap. Haha, I kid. Make no mistake, this is the AI sales pitch. A *weapon* to use on your opposition. If the hackers were trying to win by using it to wear down the defenders it could not possibly be working better.
  - conartist6 1y ago
    It is at the same time being used to tear down faith in democracy, all open content in the Internet, workers' autonomy, and generally serving to attempt to make all thought derivative while minimizing incentives to create anything new that isn't an AI
  - deleted 1y ago
whatevsmate 1y ago
How about only sending submissions to humans if they include a reproducible test case? Actual compilable source code + payload that reproduces an attack. Would this be too easily gamed by security researchers as well?
ants_everywhere 1y ago
The obvious way forward is to have AI do an initial vet, and ideally create an exploit before a human reviews.
anthonyryan1 1y ago
As the only developer maintaining a big bounty program. I believe they are all trending downward. I've recently cut bounties to zero for all but the most severe issues, hoping to refocus the program on rewarding interesting findings instead of the low value reports. So far it's done nothing to improve the situation, because nobody appears to read the rewards information before emailing. I think reading scope/rewards takes too much time per company for these low value reports. I think that speaks volumes about how much time goes into the actual discoveries. Open to suggestions to improve the signal to noise ratio from anyone whose made notable improvements to a bug bounty program.
- Aachen 1y ago
  Similarly from a hacker's point of view, I also think vulnerability reporting is in a downwards spiral. Particularly the ones organised through a platform like this just aren't reaching the right people. It used to be pgp email to whoever needs to know of it and that worked great. I have no idea if it still would today for you guys, but from my point of view it's the only reliable way to reach a human who cares about the product and not someone whose job it is to refuse bounties. I don't want bounties, I've got a day job as security consultant for that, I'm just reporting what I stumble across. Chocolate and handwritten notes are nice, but primarily I want developers and sysadmins to fix their damn software
- xg15 1y ago
  Putting on my tinfoil hat, I wonder if some of that slop might be coming from actual black-hat groups or state actors - who have an interest in making it harder to find and close real exploits. Those people wouldn't care about the bounty, overwhelming the system would be the point.
  - Applejinx 1y ago
    I think those people are busier overwhelming other, bigger systems right now, but it's a fair point. I daresay when you get down to a real salt-the-earth destroy-everything point, open source projects can expect destruction by the same people. To say nothing of the uses of real exploits: that's salient.
armchairhacker 1y ago
You could charge a fee and give the money back if the report is wrong but seems well-intentioned. I see the issue with this, it's payment platforms. Despite the hate, cryptocurrency seems like it could be a solution. But in practice, people won't take time to set up a crypto wallet just to submit a bug report, and if crypto becomes popular, it may get regulations and middlemen like fiat (which add friction, e.g. chargebacks, KYC, revenue cuts). However if more services use small fees to avoid spam it could work eventually. For instance, people could install a client that pays such fees automatically for trusted sites which refund for non-spam behavior.
- jannes 1y ago
  This is probably something that the platform HackerOne should implement. It can't be addressed on the project level. https://hackerone.com/curl/hacktivity https://hackerone.com/curl/hacktivity
  - Aachen 1y ago
    Why? I don't know if the link you posted answers the question, I get a blocked page ("You are visiting this page because we detected an unsupported browser"). You'd think a chromium-based browser would be supported but even that isn't good enough. I love open standards like html and http... Edit: just noticed it goes to hackerone and not curl's own website. Of course they'd say curl can't solve payments on their own
- latexr 1y ago
  > You could charge a fee and give the money back if the report is wrong but seems well-intentioned. That idea was considered and rejected in the article: > People mention charging a fee for the right to submit a security vulnerability (that could be paid back if a proper report). That would probably slow them down significantly sure, but it seems like a rather hostile way for an Open Source project that aims to be as open and available as possible. Not to mention that we don’t have any current infrastructure setup for this – and neither does HackerOne. And managing money is painful.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
Dilettante_ 1y ago
Takes all the self-control I have not to make a crude joke about the title
jdefr89 1y ago
Some of these AI slop report exchanges are absolutely hilarious. Love seeing people caught red handed then trying to play it off.. This is why Vulnerability Research needs more gatekeeping.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
IsTom 1y ago
You could require that submissions include an expletive or anything else that LLMs are sanitized to not produce. With how lazy these people are that ought to filter out at least some of them.
- xg15 1y ago
  They are lazy up until they lose money if they don't do something. So if this was the only way to submit the reports, they'll find a way to prompt-hack the LLM to produce the expletive. ...or, just add it to the generated text themselves.
bit1993 1y ago
AI slop is rapidly destroying the WWW, most of the content is becoming more and more low-quality and difficult to tell if its true or hallucinated. Pre-AI web content is now more like the golden-standard in terms of correctness, browsing the Internet Archive is much better. This will only cause content to go behind pay-walls, allot of open-source projects will be closed source not only because of the increased work maintainers have to do to not only review but also audit patches for potential AI hallucinations but also because their work is being used to train LLMs and re-licensed to proprietary.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  There’s more to this story than AI slop: > The general trend so far in 2025 has been way more AI slop than ever before (about 20% of all submissions) Of course that 20% of AI slop submissions are not good, but there’s an overarching problem with juniors clamoring for open source contributions without having the skills or abilities to contribute something useful. They heard that open source contributions gets jobs, so they spam contributions to famous projects.
- Expurple 1y ago
  Permissively-licensed projects (which is the majority or FOSS projects out there) could always be re-licensed to proprietary. I publish most of my code under permissive licences and will continue doing that. LLM training doesn't really change anything for me
pinebox 1y ago
Maybe a curl Patreon for would-be H1 contributors? Just need to figure out a donation amount that is trivial for legitimate security researchers, but too rich for spammers.
jgb1984 1y ago
LLM are a net negative on society on so many levels.
- anilgulecha 1y ago
  Email came with spam, and we solved it. Similarly, we're discovering the same with AI, and we'll solve it. No need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    We didn't solve it though, as the vast majority of email traffic and processing is spam and the filtering thereof.
  - lambda 1y ago
    I barely use email any more, not just due to blatant spam, but also due to companies that I need to receive one notification email each time I do a transaction, or to verify an account, as an excuse to send me daily or weekly emails. I can't necessarily block them because I might need them for a password reset or a future transaction. I spent a while trying to set up filters that work, but eventually got tired of trying to fight it. Now I mostly just avoid email for anything other than these things, and have just given up on it otherwise. Spam won. Email lost. And social media services are losing in similar ways. Rather than showing me things from people I subscribe to, they're pushing all kinds of automated "content for you" that I don't want and can't opt out of. So I'm pulling away from them as well. The internet is filling with slop and distraction, both AI generated and not, and we haven't "solved" it, it's constantly getting worse.
soyyo 1y ago
Of the 21 reports included as an example i have looked at number two, Buffer Overflow Vulnerability in WebSocket Handling #2298307 The style is obviously gpt generated and I think the curl team knows that, still they proceed to answer and keep making questions about the report to its author to get more info. It really bothers me is that these idiots are consuming the time and patience of nice and reasonable people, I really hope the can find a solution and don't eventually snap by having to deal with this bullshit.
disqard 1y ago
> You still have not told us on which source code line the buffer overflow occurs. > > hey chat, give this in a nice way so I reply on hackerone with this comment > This looks like you accidentally pasted a part of your AI chat conversation into this issue, even though you have not disclosed that you're using an AI even after having been asked multiple times. A sample of what they have to deal with. Source: https://hackerone.com/reports/3230082 https://hackerone.com/reports/3230082
- toshinoriyagi 1y ago
  The abuse of AI here blows my mind. Not just the use of AI to try to find a vulnerability in a widely-used repo, but the complete ignorance when using the AI. "hey chat, give this in a nice way so I reply on hackerone with this comment" is not language used naturally. It virtually never precedes high-quality conversation between humans so you aren't going to get that. You would only say this when prompting an LLM (poorly at that) so you are activating weights encoding information from LLM slop in the training data.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  They're still very graceful about it, seeing it as a learning opportunity instead of closing it as spam like a lot of the internet has done for the past 30 years.
bccdee 1y ago
You could implement a deposit system. People submitting reports pay a deposit fee that gets refunded immediately after the report is confirmed not to be slop. That way, the only people who pay the fee are the ones who submit slop reports.
- uv-depression 1y ago
  Did you read the link? That idea is covered there.
  - bccdee 1y ago
    Oh, whoops. I only saw that they mentioned charging a fee but thought it seemed hostile—I figured, seems like there's a way to mitigate that, but I guess they realized that too.
tvgirlfan2004 1y ago
like most of bitchat's PRs, just pure slop. these are my certified classics though: https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/155 https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/155 "Security audit: Fix critical encryption vulnerabilities" https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/219 https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/219 "Satellite networking extension for BitChat". It doesn't even look like it's going to work... https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/199 https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/199 "Secure Enclave key generation and retrieval to KeychainManager". Same folk, replying to themselves with AI.
pedrochao1985 1y ago
[dead]

259 points by robin_reala 1y ago

I think eventually all OSS projects/repos will suffer with this. My bet is that git hosting providers like GitHub etc. should start providing features to allow us for better signal/noise ratio

detaro 1y ago
Githubs owner is betting the farm on pushing slop, so that seems unlikely to happen there anytime soon.
- hiccuphippo 1y ago
  They just need to offer you more slop to review the slop and give it a sloppiness score.
nkrisc 1y ago
Why would GitHub develop features that are adversarial to one of Microsoft’s favorite products?
- oytis 1y ago
  E.g. to secure the quality of training data?
- Keyframe 1y ago
  So that you pay for both.
  - nkrisc 1y ago
    Not even the mafia has it that good. You only pay them so they won’t beat you up. Imagine if you paid them to beat you up and then paid them to protect you from them.
    - konsalexee 1y ago
      That's how you profit
- notachatbot123 1y ago
  Learning from Cloudflare: Host malware and DDOSsers AND provide protection against them = $$$
  - nkrisc 1y ago
    I feel my question is naive in retrospect.
Applejinx 1y ago
Depends. I'm not suffering it at all, but I'm a sort of research project producing variations on audio processing under MIT license. And I don't take pull requests: only exception has been to accomodate a downstream user who was running a script to incorporate the code, and that was so out of my usual experience that it took way to long to register it was a legitimate pull request.
rwmj 1y ago
qemu & libvirt are already seeing a bunch of these. Here's a recent spammer sending AI slop reports: https://gitlab.com/ququruza https://gitlab.com/ququruza

raywatcher 1y ago

For all the discussions about the slopification of the internet, the human toll on open source maintainers isn’t really talked about. It's one thing to get flooded with bad reports; it's another to have to mentally filter AI-generated submissions designed to "sound correct" but offer no real value. Totally agree with the author mentioning the emotional toll it takes to deal with these mind-numbing stupidities.

friedel 1y ago
> but offer no real value They could offer value, but just rarely, at least with the LLM/model/context they used. > toll it takes to deal with these mind-numbing stupidities. Could have a special area for submitting these where AI does the rejection letter and banning.
- meindnoch 1y ago
  >They could offer value, but just rarely, at least with the LLM/model/context they used. Eating human excrement can also offer value in the form of undigested pieces of corn and other seeds. Are you interested?
  - ElFitz 1y ago
    Funnily enough, fecal transplants (Fecal Microbiota Transplants, FMT) are a thing, used to help treat a range of diseases. It’s even being investigated to help treat depression. So…
    - javcasas 1y ago
      I'm sure it does. But would you like one every other week like the llm slop?
      - ElFitz 1y ago
        Honestly, regarding the whole "LLM slop" thing, I don’t care. I get why others do, but I just don’t. I don’t care how that sausage is made. Heck, sometimes gen AI even allows people who otherwise wouldn’t have had the time or skills to come up with funny things. What annoys me is all the spam SEO-gamed websites with low information density drowning the answer I’m actually looking for in pages of empty sentences. When they haven’t just gamed their way to the top of search results without actually containing any answer. And that didn’t need LLMs to exist. Just greed and actors with interests unaligned with mine. Such as Google’s former head of ads, apparently. [0][1] [0]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ [1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/

4gotunameagain 1y ago

Oh god, going through some of the reports listed on the bottom of the page feels like a nightmare. I cannot imagine how it is for the actual maintainers. I wonder what's the solution here. You need to be able to receive reports from anyone, so a reputation based system is not applicable. It also seems like we cannot detect whether a piece of text was generated with LLM..

Hendrikto 1y ago
I would have closed ALL of the linked reports much sooner, and banned the reporters. In most cases it is extremely obvious from very early on in the thread that these people have not the slightest idea what they are saying and just copy-paste AI responses.
amiga386 1y ago
> It also seems like we cannot detect whether a piece of text was generated with LLM Based on reading those same reports, I think you can totally can detect it, and Daniel also thinks that -- or at least, you can tell when it's very obvious and the user has pretty much just pasted what they got from the LLM into the submit box. Sneaky humans, trying to disguise their sources by removing the obvious tells, make it harder. The curl staff assume good faith and let the submitter explain themselves. Maybe the submitter has a reason for using it -- the submitter may be honest or dishonest as they wish. I like that the curl staff ask submitters to admit up-front if any AI was used, so they can discriminate between people with a legitimate use case (e.g. people who don't speak English but can find valid exploits and want to use machine translation for their writeup), versus others (e.g. people who think generalised LLMs can do security analysis). But even so, the central point of this blog post is that the bad humans waste their time, they can't get that time back, and even directly banning them does not have much of an effect on the bad humans, or the next batch of bad humans.
vincnetas 1y ago
Why reputation is not applicable. Arrange for whitelist off-channel and then submit your requests. I think that reputation and non-anonymity is the only applicable way forward. And when i say "non-anonymity" i don't mean "public". You can be non-anonymous with one person not the whole world.

EdwardDiego 1y ago

Reading this particular instance of slop was especially galling. It's like the world's slowest ChatGPT dialogue via a bug tracker. https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307 https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307

0x000xca0xfe 1y ago
DDoSing humans. LLMS are the perfect tool to annihilate online communities. I wonder when we see the first deliberate attack. These incidents seem (so far) isolated and just driven by greed.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

> Maybe we need to drop the monetary reward? That would likely fix some of it, but I suspect that you'd still get a lot, anyway, because people program their crawlers to hit everything, regardless of their relevance. Doesn't cost anything more, so why not? Every little hit adds to the coffers.

squigz 1y ago
> Doesn't cost anything more, so why not? Every little hit adds to the coffers. Uhh... How does it not cost more to hit everything vs specific areas? Especially when you consider the actual payout rate for such approaches, which cannot possibly be very high - every little hit does not add to the coffers, which means you have to be more selective about what you try.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Spammers and scammers have been running “scattershot” campaigns for decades. Works well for them, I guess, as they still do it. AI just allows them to be more effective.

comeon1544 1y ago

[flagged]

sammy2255 1y ago
[flagged]
j16sdiz 1y ago
It cost basically nothing to setup a vpn..
muglug 1y ago
Yes, Americans aren’t gullible enough to believe AI tools’ output is true, as proven by their non-inclusion on this list: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/ https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
justin66 1y ago
I know it’s not very PC but we need to be honest about the real threat here: Welsh people.
meindnoch 1y ago
[flagged]
amiga386 1y ago
No, we don't. AI slop is a worldwide phenomenon. Looking at just the users who submitted the reports on curl's AI slop list: * 4 users accounts are now closed/banned, so I don't know their activity * 12 users have only submitted invalid/spam reports to curl, and nobody else. They probably just open a new account each time, and they can come from anywhere, and claim to be anyone. * 5 users have at least one accepted report (to curl or anywhere else). These should be people who care about their reputation, and yet they've been caught submitting AI slop at least once. Of those 5, one is from Florida, USA, one is from Noida, India, and the other 3 don't disclose their location.
- gus_massa 1y ago

lysace 1y ago

Sort of separate but perhaps also relevant to the thousands cuts/slops: Isn't the scope of curl/libcurl a bit too big? It supports almost every file-related networking protocol under the sun and a few more just for fun. (https://everything.curl.dev/protocols/curl.html https://everything.curl.dev/protocols/curl.html) Meanwhile 99.8% of users (assuming) just use it for HTTP. Here's a few complex protocols I bet many do not know that curl supports: - SMB - IMAP - LDAP - RTMP - RTSP - SFTP - SMTP At the very least, this magnifies the cost of dealing with AI slop security reports and sometimes also the risk for users.

soulcutter 1y ago
> Isn't the scope of curl/libcurl a bit too big? No.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
proactivesvcs 1y ago
From this year's curl user survey, whilst HTTP/S is the majority use, more than 10% of users are using FTP and WebSockets and 5% still using telnet! https://curl.se/docs/survey/2025-1.1/ https://curl.se/docs/survey/2025-1.1/
- lysace 1y ago
  > The survey was announced on the curl-users and curl-library mailing lists (with reminders), numerous times on Daniel’s Mastodon (@bagder@mastodon.social) on LinkedIn and on Daniel’s blog (https://daniel.haxx.se/blog https://daniel.haxx.se/blog). The survey was also announced on the curl web site at the top of most pages on the site that made it hard to miss for visitors. It's not hard to imagine how that would miss the 99.x% users who just want to download an HTTP/S resource after reading an instruction on some web page.
appreciatorBus 1y ago
I’m sure the case could be made before a more focussed project, but I think this is orthogonal to bad (or stupid) actors using AI to overwhelm bug reporting channels. The issue highlighted in the article is people using AI to invent security problems that don’t exist. That doesn’t go away, no matter much you stripped down or simplify the project. I’d bet an AI writing tool will happily generate thousands of realistic looking bug reports about a “Hello World” one-liner.

yayitswei 1y ago

Make it cost money to submit.

cjs_ac 1y ago
... and use the proceeds to increase the bounties paid to genuine bug reports.
bla3 1y ago
The "Possible routes forward" section in the linked post mentions this suggestion, and why the author doesn't love it.
komali2 1y ago
"Submit deposit." They get the money back in all cases where the bug is determined not to be AI slop, including it not being a real bug, user error, etc. Otherwise, deposit gone.

EdwardDiego 1y ago

> The length check only accounts for tmplen (the original string length), but this msnprintf call expands the string by adding two control characters (CURL_NEW_ENV_VAR and CURL_NEW_ENV_VALUE). This discrepancy allows an attacker ...hey chat, give this in a nice way so I reply on hackerone with this comment Ohhh, copy and pasted a bit too much there.

Hendrikto 1y ago
> Certainly! Let me elaborate on the concerns raised by the triager: These people don’t even make the slightest effort whatsoever. I admire Daniel’s patience in dealing with them. Reading these threads is infuriating. They very obviously just copy and paste AI responses without even understanding what they are talking about.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Soon enough (if not already) there will be automated systems that post it without human intervention, and so also without human filtering or reading the LLM output.

leovingi 1y ago

And it's not just vulnerability reports that are affected by this general trend. I use social media, X specifically, to follow a lot of artists, mostly for inspiration and because I find it fun to share some of the work that other artists have created, but over the past year or so I find that the mental workload it takes for me to figure out if a particular piece of art is AI-generated is too much and I start leaning into the safe option of "don't share anything that seems even remotely suspicious unless I can verify the author". The amount of art posts that I have shared with others has decreased significantly, to the point where I am almost certain some artists who have created genuine works simply get filtered out because their work "looks" like it could have been AI-generated... It's getting to the point where if I see anything that is AI it's an instant mute or block, because there is nothing of value there - it's just noise clogging up my feed.

DaSHacka 1y ago
Genuine question; if you cant tell, why does it matter?
- leovingi 1y ago
  It's a fair question and one that I've asked myself as well. I like to use the example of chess. I know that computers can beat human players and that there are technical advancements in the field that are useful in their own right, but I would never consistently watch a game of chess played between a computer and a human. Why? Because I don't care for it. To me, the fun and excitement is in seeing what a HUMAN can achieve, what a HUMAN can create - I apply the same logic to art as well. As I'm currently learning how to draw myself, I know how difficult it is and seeing other people working hard at their craft to eventually produce something beautiful, after months and years of work - it's a shared experience. It makes me happy! Seeing someone prompt an AI, wait half-a-minute and then post it on social media does not, even if the end result is of a reasonable quality.
  - impossiblefork 1y ago
    But how can't you tell? To me AI generated art without repeated major human interventions is almost immediately obvious. There are things it just can't do.

silvestrov 1y ago

> charging a fee [...] rather hostile way for an Open Source project that aims to be as open and available as possible The most hostile is Apple where you cannot expect any kind of feedback on bug reports. You are really lucky if you get any kind of feedback from Apple. Getting good feedback is the most valuable thing ever. I don't mind having to pay $5/year to be make reports if I know I would get feedback.

omnicognate 1y ago
This is because Apple software is perfect by definition. Any perceived bug is an example of someone failing to use the software correctly. Bug reports are records of user incompetence, whose only purpose is to be ritually mocked in morale-enhancing genius confirmation sessions.
latexr 1y ago
> You are really lucky if you get any kind of feedback from Apple. Hard disagree. When you get feedback from Apple, it’s more often than not a waste of time. You are lucky when you get no feedback and the issue is fixed.
- justsid 1y ago
  “Can you check if this still occurs in $(current beta version)” after 3 years of silence.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

IAmLiterallyAB 1y ago

Minimum reputation to submit might help

__bjoernd 1y ago
How do I gather reputation to submit without being able to submit something?
- the_snooze 1y ago
  Probably the same as in any other high-trust human interaction: you have to have someone on the inside introduce you and vouch for you.

caioluders 1y ago

Make a private program with monetary rewards and a public program without. Invite only verified researchers.

spydum 1y ago
Right? I thought the value of these vuln programs like hackerone and bugbounty would be you could use the submitters reputation to filter the noise? Don't want to accept low quality submissions from new or low experience reports? Turn the knob up..
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

placardloop 1y ago

These AI reports are just an acceleration of the slop created by similar human “researchers”. The real root cause of this is that most security “professionals” have been trained to do the bare minimum of work and expect a payday from it. There’s an entire industry of “penetration testers” that do nothing more than run Fortify against your code base and then expect you to pay them $100k for handing over the findings report. And now AI makes it even easier to do that faster. We have an industry that pats security engineers on the back for discovering the “coolest” security issue - and nothing that incentivizes them to make sure that it actually is a useful finding, or more importantly, actually helping to fix it. Even at my big tech company, where I truly think some of the smartest security people work, they all have this attitude that their job is just to uncover an issue, drop it in someone else’s lap, and then expect a gold star and a payout, never mind the fact that their finding made no sense and was just a waste of time for the developer team. There is an attitude that security people don’t have any responsibility for making things better - only for pointing out the bad things. And that attitude is carrying over into this AI slop. There’s no incentive for security people to not just “spray and pray” security issues at you. We need to stop paying out but bounties for discovering things, and instead better incentivize fixing them - in the process weeding out reports that don’t actually lead to a fix.

conartist6 1y ago
Oh yes. AI has nothing to do with it! It is Totally Outrageous and Unexpected that AI would be abused to spew a lot of low value crap. Haha, I kid. Make no mistake, this is the AI sales pitch. A *weapon* to use on your opposition. If the hackers were trying to win by using it to wear down the defenders it could not possibly be working better.
- conartist6 1y ago
  It is at the same time being used to tear down faith in democracy, all open content in the Internet, workers' autonomy, and generally serving to attempt to make all thought derivative while minimizing incentives to create anything new that isn't an AI
- deleted 1y ago

whatevsmate 1y ago

How about only sending submissions to humans if they include a reproducible test case? Actual compilable source code + payload that reproduces an attack. Would this be too easily gamed by security researchers as well?

ants_everywhere 1y ago

The obvious way forward is to have AI do an initial vet, and ideally create an exploit before a human reviews.

anthonyryan1 1y ago

As the only developer maintaining a big bounty program. I believe they are all trending downward. I've recently cut bounties to zero for all but the most severe issues, hoping to refocus the program on rewarding interesting findings instead of the low value reports. So far it's done nothing to improve the situation, because nobody appears to read the rewards information before emailing. I think reading scope/rewards takes too much time per company for these low value reports. I think that speaks volumes about how much time goes into the actual discoveries. Open to suggestions to improve the signal to noise ratio from anyone whose made notable improvements to a bug bounty program.

Aachen 1y ago
Similarly from a hacker's point of view, I also think vulnerability reporting is in a downwards spiral. Particularly the ones organised through a platform like this just aren't reaching the right people. It used to be pgp email to whoever needs to know of it and that worked great. I have no idea if it still would today for you guys, but from my point of view it's the only reliable way to reach a human who cares about the product and not someone whose job it is to refuse bounties. I don't want bounties, I've got a day job as security consultant for that, I'm just reporting what I stumble across. Chocolate and handwritten notes are nice, but primarily I want developers and sysadmins to fix their damn software
xg15 1y ago
Putting on my tinfoil hat, I wonder if some of that slop might be coming from actual black-hat groups or state actors - who have an interest in making it harder to find and close real exploits. Those people wouldn't care about the bounty, overwhelming the system would be the point.
- Applejinx 1y ago
  I think those people are busier overwhelming other, bigger systems right now, but it's a fair point. I daresay when you get down to a real salt-the-earth destroy-everything point, open source projects can expect destruction by the same people. To say nothing of the uses of real exploits: that's salient.

armchairhacker 1y ago

You could charge a fee and give the money back if the report is wrong but seems well-intentioned. I see the issue with this, it's payment platforms. Despite the hate, cryptocurrency seems like it could be a solution. But in practice, people won't take time to set up a crypto wallet just to submit a bug report, and if crypto becomes popular, it may get regulations and middlemen like fiat (which add friction, e.g. chargebacks, KYC, revenue cuts). However if more services use small fees to avoid spam it could work eventually. For instance, people could install a client that pays such fees automatically for trusted sites which refund for non-spam behavior.

jannes 1y ago
This is probably something that the platform HackerOne should implement. It can't be addressed on the project level. https://hackerone.com/curl/hacktivity https://hackerone.com/curl/hacktivity
- Aachen 1y ago
  Why? I don't know if the link you posted answers the question, I get a blocked page ("You are visiting this page because we detected an unsupported browser"). You'd think a chromium-based browser would be supported but even that isn't good enough. I love open standards like html and http... Edit: just noticed it goes to hackerone and not curl's own website. Of course they'd say curl can't solve payments on their own
latexr 1y ago
> You could charge a fee and give the money back if the report is wrong but seems well-intentioned. That idea was considered and rejected in the article: > People mention charging a fee for the right to submit a security vulnerability (that could be paid back if a proper report). That would probably slow them down significantly sure, but it seems like a rather hostile way for an Open Source project that aims to be as open and available as possible. Not to mention that we don’t have any current infrastructure setup for this – and neither does HackerOne. And managing money is painful.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago

Dilettante_ 1y ago

Takes all the self-control I have not to make a crude joke about the title

jdefr89 1y ago

Some of these AI slop report exchanges are absolutely hilarious. Love seeing people caught red handed then trying to play it off.. This is why Vulnerability Research needs more gatekeeping.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

IsTom 1y ago

You could require that submissions include an expletive or anything else that LLMs are sanitized to not produce. With how lazy these people are that ought to filter out at least some of them.

xg15 1y ago
They are lazy up until they lose money if they don't do something. So if this was the only way to submit the reports, they'll find a way to prompt-hack the LLM to produce the expletive. ...or, just add it to the generated text themselves.

bit1993 1y ago

AI slop is rapidly destroying the WWW, most of the content is becoming more and more low-quality and difficult to tell if its true or hallucinated. Pre-AI web content is now more like the golden-standard in terms of correctness, browsing the Internet Archive is much better. This will only cause content to go behind pay-walls, allot of open-source projects will be closed source not only because of the increased work maintainers have to do to not only review but also audit patches for potential AI hallucinations but also because their work is being used to train LLMs and re-licensed to proprietary.

Aurornis 1y ago
There’s more to this story than AI slop: > The general trend so far in 2025 has been way more AI slop than ever before (about 20% of all submissions) Of course that 20% of AI slop submissions are not good, but there’s an overarching problem with juniors clamoring for open source contributions without having the skills or abilities to contribute something useful. They heard that open source contributions gets jobs, so they spam contributions to famous projects.
Expurple 1y ago
Permissively-licensed projects (which is the majority or FOSS projects out there) could always be re-licensed to proprietary. I publish most of my code under permissive licences and will continue doing that. LLM training doesn't really change anything for me

pinebox 1y ago

Maybe a curl Patreon for would-be H1 contributors? Just need to figure out a donation amount that is trivial for legitimate security researchers, but too rich for spammers.

jgb1984 1y ago

LLM are a net negative on society on so many levels.

anilgulecha 1y ago
Email came with spam, and we solved it. Similarly, we're discovering the same with AI, and we'll solve it. No need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  We didn't solve it though, as the vast majority of email traffic and processing is spam and the filtering thereof.
- lambda 1y ago
  I barely use email any more, not just due to blatant spam, but also due to companies that I need to receive one notification email each time I do a transaction, or to verify an account, as an excuse to send me daily or weekly emails. I can't necessarily block them because I might need them for a password reset or a future transaction. I spent a while trying to set up filters that work, but eventually got tired of trying to fight it. Now I mostly just avoid email for anything other than these things, and have just given up on it otherwise. Spam won. Email lost. And social media services are losing in similar ways. Rather than showing me things from people I subscribe to, they're pushing all kinds of automated "content for you" that I don't want and can't opt out of. So I'm pulling away from them as well. The internet is filling with slop and distraction, both AI generated and not, and we haven't "solved" it, it's constantly getting worse.

soyyo 1y ago

Of the 21 reports included as an example i have looked at number two, Buffer Overflow Vulnerability in WebSocket Handling #2298307 The style is obviously gpt generated and I think the curl team knows that, still they proceed to answer and keep making questions about the report to its author to get more info. It really bothers me is that these idiots are consuming the time and patience of nice and reasonable people, I really hope the can find a solution and don't eventually snap by having to deal with this bullshit.

disqard 1y ago

> You still have not told us on which source code line the buffer overflow occurs. > > hey chat, give this in a nice way so I reply on hackerone with this comment > This looks like you accidentally pasted a part of your AI chat conversation into this issue, even though you have not disclosed that you're using an AI even after having been asked multiple times. A sample of what they have to deal with. Source: https://hackerone.com/reports/3230082 https://hackerone.com/reports/3230082

toshinoriyagi 1y ago
The abuse of AI here blows my mind. Not just the use of AI to try to find a vulnerability in a widely-used repo, but the complete ignorance when using the AI. "hey chat, give this in a nice way so I reply on hackerone with this comment" is not language used naturally. It virtually never precedes high-quality conversation between humans so you aren't going to get that. You would only say this when prompting an LLM (poorly at that) so you are activating weights encoding information from LLM slop in the training data.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
They're still very graceful about it, seeing it as a learning opportunity instead of closing it as spam like a lot of the internet has done for the past 30 years.

bccdee 1y ago

You could implement a deposit system. People submitting reports pay a deposit fee that gets refunded immediately after the report is confirmed not to be slop. That way, the only people who pay the fee are the ones who submit slop reports.

uv-depression 1y ago
Did you read the link? That idea is covered there.
- bccdee 1y ago
  Oh, whoops. I only saw that they mentioned charging a fee but thought it seemed hostile—I figured, seems like there's a way to mitigate that, but I guess they realized that too.

tvgirlfan2004 1y ago

like most of bitchat's PRs, just pure slop. these are my certified classics though: https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/155 https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/155 "Security audit: Fix critical encryption vulnerabilities" https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/219 https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/219 "Satellite networking extension for BitChat". It doesn't even look like it's going to work... https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/199 https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/199 "Secure Enclave key generation and retrieval to KeychainManager". Same folk, replying to themselves with AI.

pedrochao1985 1y ago

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