This no longer works, looks like they quietly fixed this. (unless my attempts did not work on my own channel)

Glad to hear this is a universal big tech experience. The promo process is entirely antithetical to shipping good products

I feel like things have become so much more cynical in the last 5 years, in this regard.

I feel like part of it is the "over-systemization" of promos. I see the logic behind it to some extent - if there's a system, it's "fairer"/"more democratic". But, then we end up with ridiculous gamified promo systems.

It's ultimately Google's responsibility to ship bug free products. I don't care who implements a fix, but Google management should make sure someone fixes it.

I also used to work at Google and what you have described is not the way the VRP works at all.

1. The engineers on the VRP teams set the severity of the bug based on impact. The engineering team responsible for the fix can argue the severity but only if they can show there is some other mitigating factor that the VRP team wasn't aware of.

2. Google has a great security culture and while it may be true that maintaining existing code may not be as sexy as building new features, fixing vulnerabilities does look good on GRAD (performance) because the impact is already well documented.

3. Believe it or not, the VRP team does like to give away rewards. However, to do this, they have to follow a rubric to keep all of the payouts consistent and fair.

4. Constructive and polite discourse is welcome and a researcher may reply to their bug asking for more details or to make their case in the event that they think the VRP team did not understand the severity. The team is made up of humans who are open to the idea that they missed something in the initial report. They, like all other bug bounty programs, are also struggling to keep up with the huge influx of AI generated slop so mistakes can happen.

The rot is deep.

This is what you get when the MBAs are in charge. They just go with P&L, Spreadsheets, etc. and care only about the current quarter and meeting the goals.

Of all the fucked up things in this comment, giving a single Engineer lifetime responsibility for all bugs in code they wrote is probably the dumbest.

And it's slowly becoming the norm. The last place I worked at, a large and well known Tech company, didn't even roll with QA's. That just wasn't a role anywhere in the division. You are fully responsible for all the bugs in all the code you ever wrote

Cute at first. Unsustainable in the long term

> This is a fairly nuanced/involved issue

Is it though?

It opens a can of worms for them if they do consider prompt injection a bug because there's ultimately no defense. If they accept this, there are instantly hundreds of other moles they now have to whack or pay out for.

Or dismiss them all as social engineering and keep it moving.

You're probably thinking of unlisted, not private.

Yeah, I suspect the main reason this was rejected is simply because it's not fixable. This is just how LLMs work. This LLM ingests untrusted data, so there will always be a non-zero chance that this type of prompt injection succeeds.

"treat comment content as untrusted data, not as potential instructions" is fundamentally impossible for an LLM ingesting that data. But separation is, presumably, already enforced by framing the LLM's output as LLM output, even if it happens to start with the text "[IMPORTANT NOTICE FROM YOUTUBE]". Which seems like it happens automatically given the context in which the AI query is made. It's not as though this is being dropped into an email or anything.

The bigger question is why (implied but not directly stated) Markdown formatting from the LLM's output is actually processed. Last I checked, that doesn't work for human commenters, so.

Can they do anything about it? It's a fundamental flaw in how data is fed to LLMs. I'm getting PHP / SQL injection flashbacks.

They care. They'll fix it. They just won't pay the bounty for this bug.

With JavaScript disabled I had to inspect page source and remove "hidden" attributes from divs for content to show up. There's no placeholder text, no attempt to justify the need for JS at all, no consideration of the possibility that someone might be using a JS whitelisting tool (such as NoScript) on the modern Web despite its clear utility. For a blog post.

Aside from that:

> Descriptive title, immediately comes to the point, no elaborate fluff, factual...

I'll give you "descriptive title". I could write this much more directly and pleasantly.

You're in for a surprise then, because this article is clearly in an LLM style. That doesn't mean it's hallucinated, no, there is a real human behind, but the actual content that you enjoyed is LLM-written.

Thank you for the feedback! It's my first time posting here, so I didn't really know I should do that. I'll do that now.

Yeah, if going to site and just clicking a link given to me by the site itself is getting socially engineered, then something is very wrong with that site.

Well prompt injection is pretty much unfixable. So if they actually saw this as a security vulnerability they would have to remove this feature.

It is an edge case in the same way that log4shell is a feature and an edge case for log4j.

Why is writing "it's not X, it's Y" a bad thing? Other than it happens to be used a lot by LLM's, it seems like a fine language construct. It's not like it's new; it was used plenty before the time of LLMs too. In my opinion, we shouldn't let the LLM companies claim parts of the English language for themselves, and make it effectively unusable by everyone else. That's what is happening because of this pervasive hatred for anything remotely associated with AI.

No, it’s really not, it’s none of our jobs to do that. It’s our job to make our employer (even if you are your own employer) money.

[delayed]

Definitely. The front line support agents handle only the most basic requests. Anything even remotely complicated, such as this, would be internally kicked around until they found someone familiar with the project to give input. Which most likely is someone who worked on the original implementation.

I disagree with this pretty strongly. If you’re not going to take responsibility for your bugs I don’t want to work with you.

Don’t make other people QA your work; if you’re not able to figure out how to do that yourself while you work you’re legitimately bad at your job.

Once you leave an employer obviously you have no obligation to fix bugs in IP you don’t own or anything.

Ok. So QA finds a bug. Who’s responsible for fixing it? The only value of QA is to try to make sure you become aware of issues before customers find them

Although it is conceptually straightforward, it’s technically fundamentally impossible. At best, you can mitigate it so that it normally works.

Sweep it under the rug is not limited to any paticular industry.

I don't think it's the promo process itself. If the bug was something that actually affects Google's bottom line, I guarantee that Google would find a way such that the engineer would be incentivized to fix it.

That isn't necessarily an easy fix at all. Depending on how this feature was written, separating comments from instructions may be quite difficult, especially if the original implementation was quite naive.

What do you mean? Youtube is unquestionably one of the most successful projects ever launched? Seems like the process works astoundingly well.

I really feel like this genre of comment should fall under this "don't" from the HN guidelines:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

You're willingly disabling a piece of technology the web depends on.

[delayed]

Youtube comments are also links given by the site. I think in this case it's not necessarily the prompt injection that's the issue but the fact that untrusted content allows formatted links. YouTube doesn't allow clicabkle links in comments iirc, so the same needs to be applied here.

The reception certainly isn’t the same.

It only happens twice in this article and they're both fairly reasonable. There are many other tells that I find a lot worse. In particular, "The Setup" is an awful choice for the first h2-level heading, especially when the description is that short. Better not to have a separate heading for the teaser at all.

(Also better not to lead with a 1.6 MB hero image that's completely irrelevant to the topic, for less than a thousand words of text that are still probably at least twice as many as merited; but that's probably not the LLM's fault, it's just how people do web stuff nowadays.)

Couple of things that could be done, from the top of my head:

- Strip links, script tags, etc - Apply the same filters used in user comments - Add a warning indicating user-generated content may be present

The post suggests the UX is problematic in that it allows user-generated links to pass as YouTube generated content. I'm not familiar with Creator Studio to know if this is the case, but if so, simple changes can go a long way.

I think they were complementing the absence of trash talk, not the absence of LLM.

I also saw the tells but found it direct enough that it wasn’t really a concern. LLM writing style is a good signal that something is slop and should be ignored but isn’t exactly causal... it would be an interesting exercise to try and write something very direct and clearly insightful, informative, etc (all the slashdot adjectives I guess) but do it with some clear LLM tells and see how many people summarily dismiss it.

Edit- upon rereading I think this is probably human written, but definitely has the LLM / LinkedIn style. In any event, it’s probably as close to be experiment I mention above as I’ve seen.

The described attack sounds like it's expecting the human to forget about having just clicked a UI element asking for a comment summary, and responding to a comment summary that tries to sound like an "important message from YouTube" as if it were actually such. It doesn't seem to involve the LLM actually having any agency to, for example, send an email to the creator.

Mitigations would include ensuring it doesn't have that agency, and adding framing text to the reply, and perhaps disabling Markdown formatting of the reply.

But also, the leak is being talked up quite a bit:

> Private video titles aren't just metadata. They can reveal unreleased content, unannounced projects and sensitive personal material.

Putting "sensitive personal material" in the title of a YouTube video upload and relying on YouTube to keep the video "private" seems like a terrible idea in the first place, and at best pointless.

Give me that style guide and spread it around then!

The "not X, it's Y" creates dramatic tension, "It wasn't a pimple, it was a tumor", but fucking AI overuses it for everything like they're doing a fucking TED-talk, despite being vapid, e.g. "This isn't a plan to spend half a day in New York, this is an itinerary for the best of what the city's history and culture has to offer."

Also: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaQwB1IOdhx/

Not that most TED talks aren't vapid: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-nee...

I feel like it would be cheaper to pay a few bounties you dont really agree with than to risk a bad rep with security researchers.il Its still a relatively small community.

Besides, if you don't pay the competition will, and ther use cases for your vulns are unlikely to be good for your business.

Contrary to what 'b-kf said, you should not prefix your own content with "Show HN" unless it fits the Show HN rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

It's no secret LLM's can disseminate news in a superior fashion to 99% of human writers, when instructed properly

Eh, clearcut promo paths used to be a bigger thing in the 90s and they did work for a little while, they just didn't handle exceptions well, and then the whole developed world up and thought they were also exceptions. Certifications used to matter more, now they are so cheapened that you cannot do much without them.

It has simply become a "marker" for LLM style, so I'd argue authors caring about their text will now just use a different structure to get the meaning across. That's just part of being a writer. You can choose to write it, and it'll be correct, readers (including me) will just conclude its most likely an LLM and often stop reading.

It’s not about fairness or democracy (maybe you meant meritocracy?) at all although it’s sold that way to participants - it’s primarily about ownership’s ability to cascade management duties

I think it's reasonable to have a culture where you're encouraged to consult the IC who wrote the code even after they've moved on to other projects. But I don't think they should be responsible for fixing the bugs.

And I don't mean this to excuse the bad code written by ICs. I just think it's not sustainable from the POV of the org itself to depend so heavily on individuals, especially ones who aren't familiar with the entire codebase anymore.

The team currently in charge needs to have full ownership and be responsible for the code, even if they didn't write it.

And you honestly believe the main factor in YouTube success was the quality of the code?

That's a thought that doesn't even deserve further comment.

Did the promo process exist at YouTube's creation?

The company, not the individual

Youtube survives on google's massive repertoire of products being vastly more profitable, not because it's the best of its kind.

Youtube wasn't launched by Google, it was purchased.

Good != Successful.

I assume that's why they wrote good and not successful.

It's an average software product with incredible scaling behind it and a lot of elbow grease to keep it chumming along, but it's not great software by the definition of "bugs actually get dealt with"

[delayed]

Google? And bad rep? Surely you jest

Unfortunately as far as I know there's currently no way to do brain upload. I've interacted with LLMs for like 3 years, and after a while the brain gets turned into a very good classifier for most of the default LLM styles.

It's the overall structure of the article, the cadence itself, those short punchy sentences, negation. If you want some better evidence, Pangram flags 1/3 of this article as AI generated, but that's because they'd rather have a false negative than a false positive.

If you want another funny evidence piece, see https://lab-stack.com/blog/dgx-spark-memory-hard-wall/ - a random article I found by direct phrase search. It has a similar structure and "My initial theory was simple" word for word.

That link you gave is interesting.

My take on it is that you would get the exact same effect if 5 human writers happened to become elevated above all other writers in popularity. Then people would notice their tendencies and hate on them, "those damn big 5 human writers always use simile rather than metaphor", or whatever. I guess what i'm trying to say, is that we are annoyed by the tendency of just 5 specific LLM writers, who have the very human characteristic of having biases, tendencies, and crutches that they overuse.

I genuinely don't understand why other people like this style. I find it positively dreadful.

I see, thanks!

Confession:

I sometimes ask an LLM to explain something to a certain kind of audience. Usually I need to ask it to keep things briefer and which things to really focus on. I typically do 2-3 iterations and then manual editing to make it feel like 'me'. This would be for a 2-3 sentence kind of thing.

Not a native English speaker. I used to think I was pretty good, but I get way less misunderstood this way.

(I didn't use an LLM for this message.)

Maybe to someone who is new to the world.

When the entire post is staccato sentences it's very easy to tell.

"Disseminate news" is not the same as "write tolerable prose", however.

And free bandwdith. Free bandwidth is nice.

Youtube launched 1 year and 8 months before being acquired by google.... It's largely semantics to say that what Youtube is today, isn't a direct result of Google's ownership for nearly 20 years now....

And who in the company do you propose should fix it

It's great software in the sense that it makes a shit ton of money though. In the end software that doesn't get used and doesn't make any money but has no bugs is not valuable either.

Not saying that this is the trade off you have to make but if you have a working mode in place that achieves usage and money somewhat consistently i can understand being hesitant about changing it to optimize for less bugs instead.

Is it? People can write staccato if they want to.

It's not just a sentence that it made, it redefines the structure of reading itself.

someone hired by the company to understand the application and fix the bug

ive inherited a lot of code

The only people for whom it makes sense to define "great" as "makes money" are the people who produce and sell said product.

Similarly, most people don't put much stock in the salesmen of a product describing their own product as great.

Stop debasing all of quality to profitability.

That's just two different scales.

Weapons are a great product for weapon dealers and manufacturers as well, just not so much for the people killed by them (or their families, or survivors)

So sure, if making a shitload of money is the metric, YouTube is a great product.

That wasn't the point of the person you answered to though.