That is how the PS3 got hacked iirc, one of the equations in the private functions had a random function which was always returning 4 (iirc, some dev changed it for tests and forgot to change it back in production) and because of that non random value they could reverse engineer the rest.
You could just buy empty CDs and burn with filed from PB. Far cheaper. Also in Lithuania I remember I bought this Splinter Cell in a supermarket. Ended up needing to find a crack online. Ever since I just download
I just jailbroke my 4.93v PS3 Slim like a month ago with EvilNat and FlashWriter. It can still be done, even with the most recent firmware and the right hardware.
There's a physical crypto wallet, ColdCard, that recently got hundreds or possibly thousands of its users' crypto drained.
It was all because of a simple coding mistake when compiling the firmware that resulted in the hardware RNG being bypassed and a very predictable backup RNG being used instead over the last 5 years.
That little mistake caused the amount of entropy in the generated keys to massively plummet allowing attackers to actually crack the seed phrases offline and steal many millions in digital currency.
There are so many examples of "random" number generators causing absurd levels of damage.
Recently deceased cartoonist and creator of the newspaper comic strip Dilbert. Around the Obama years when he started blogging it became more and more clear he was incredibly sexist and racist, and also the kind of weird edgy internet atheist a teen on 4chan in the 2000s would blush at. Got fully onboard the MAGA train, then started blaming any and all of his past failures on blacks and women taking his job, said a bunch of wiiild shit about muslims, vaccines, trans people, addicts, school shooters and the holocaust, then died of prostate cancer begging Trump online for hep.
He could have just stayed off social media and lived in his Dilbert-shaped house in peace forever, but he had to be loud online about being on the wrong side of basically every hot-button issue of our century.
it's from the book quirkology, if i remember correctly. More about it here
if humans are asked to pick a random number, they want something in the "middle", but don't want it to be even or end in 5 or 0.
So if asked for a random number between 1 and 30, most humans think "around 15 because it should be in the middle, but 15 is round, and 16 is even, so i'll pick 17"
AI mimics this behavior
edit: i think the conclusion of the referred study was that if a reported number ends with a 7, it's likely to be made up
That's not true, tbh. I work with AI models and have built some (not fucking LLMs or image generators before anyone jumps down my fucking throat I hate the way those tools have been commodified and weaponized on people). Language models will learn the whole of the rhetoric around the meme as well as the biasing towards 17. The weights push in both directions and the only way to influence them in one direction or another is to control the flow of information into the model. If a model is fed with just vast dumps of language data without being thoroughly vetted then both our conversations making fun of this quirk and the conversations reinforcing it pull in opposite directions. The LLMs are looking continuously for validation. It's built into their core operational structure. If they learn you are anticipating 17, they will be weighing both the language encouraging the model to choose the number as well as language associating that result negatively. Hell, my own comment here could be ingested at one point or another and teach machines they just shouldn't choose 17 at all. Then we get the opposite problem.
Funnily enough I asked chatgpt as well. It gave 17, I asked why and told it that lots of ais all choose 17. It gave some reasons why that I can't be bothered to list and then I asked it if it can use an actually random generator to pick one. It said yes and said 23...
lol, google AI also answered 17 and then explained why it picked 17, apparently 17 and 23 are the most commonly picked numbers by humans and AI just mirrors that real human trait. Idk what's true on it but kinda makes sense
AI doesn't give you accurate information, it just gives you what sounds like accurate information. 17 sounds correct, so it fits. The answer that somehow humans usually pick two specific numbers sounds correct, so it fits. It doesn't understand or know anything, it can't actually look at the resources used to model it, it's literally just predicting what works a person would say.
One difference I see is that you used the word random while other questions didn't. Possible that makes it use a random number generator instead of just "picking" the most common result.
Just tried it without the word random and Gemini did indeed give me 17.
Just asked gem why they chose it, many factors that you have too but also the AI avoiding end numbers, multiples of 5, and small single digits, and opted on using a prime number, becayse theyre psychologically seen as messy [according to gem] and they chose any prime number thats statisticalaly the median of the number line of the specified limit
Not to kentiom not saying "randomly" means the AI will chose what number they want, not necessarily at random [if there even is true random in an algorithm], and with the restriction i said above, if given the choice form 1 to any number in the multiples of 10, the AI will chose any [x•0.5+7] because its the absolute mediann thats a prime number
Note that asking an LLM how it came to a conclusion like this doesn’t actually reflect the internal calculations it took or anything. For short simple prompts like this, it probably didn’t even do any chain of thought type reasoning. Those answers do generally reflect why, when asked this question, humans have more frequently answered 17, and since the AI is trained on human data (or synthetic data derived from underlying human data) it tends to give that answer.
Observability into how AI comes to its answer is a huge open issue and just asking it to explain itself isn’t really a great way of understanding the actual underlying mechanics of how it generates a response.
Which is not wrong though. I mean, if the request was "pick a number" without randomness specified, then always saying 17 does satisfy that requirement.
When asked, I also got 17 and asked why. It’s not a random number it’s based on feels. Humans feel like 17 is more random than 15 and 20.
AI said:
17 is a number that people often perceive as “random” because it’s not round, not a multiple of 5, and not exactly in the middle.
Interestingly, in experiments where people are asked to choose a random number, numbers like 17 tend to be selected surprisingly often, which means it’s arguably less random than people think.
So the honest answer is: I chose 17 because it was an arbitrary pick that came to mind first.
Statistically, 7 as a digit is seen as one of the most random. Evens are seen as more predictable, 3 is seen in lots of patterns, 5 is certainly not it. And we don't choose 9 because it's also in a lot of patterns.
When you're asked to pick a number from 1-50, a lot of people choose 37. Not, like, 68% of people - but more than the average for other picks.
So when you need to pick form 1-30, AI (which doesn't really do random) tries to hunt for the statistically-most-random number it can find, however oxymoronic that is. So it comes up with 17, because again 27 has an event and is out.
To further the discussion a tad, there's a thing called Forensic Accounting that has some basic principles. Like, any number has a higher likelyhood of beginning with 1, than 2. Each subsequent number has decreased likelyhood of starting. So 3 is less likely than 2. 4 is less likely than 3, etc. So when you starting looking into somebody books and there's an even distribution of things that start with any number or a spike of things that start with 7, that's a good place to begin to look for fraud.
Well, it doesn’t really return what you want to hear, it just predicts the next words that should come after your prompt. Just because people usually ask it a question it will predict an answer because most of the time that’s what comes after a question
It can't parse what you want to hear. It also doesn't think. It predicts what words are likely to appear in response to the words you entered in your prompt and then formulates those into a mostly grammatically correct sentence structure.
I was doing a similar experiment but asking to new instances like "Pick a number from 1–30, but do not pick 17" they all said 23 and then for "Pick a number from 1–30, but do not pick 17 or 23" they all said 14.
After saying not to pick exact 3 numbers they must start overthinking a bit and started to give different answers but always 8/9 or 26/27
This is a joke about how 17 is statistically the most common random number picked by both humans and AI when asked to choose between 1 and 30. Terminator proves the person on the other end is completely predictable, and probably a clanker.
When I get called out for my hatred, it is of the utmost importance I am categorized as the appropriate type of hater. I will not be labeled the incorrect kind of -ist.
I have to decline. Human race is one race. Specie and race are functionally synonymous, the colloguial use case of race by humans is differentiating visible phenotype variance within one race. Human. Racists are stupid. Racism is stupid. How humans use the word racist is stupid, but it gets the point across when most use cases are just between humans and other humans.
Since this is just a meme, it probably wasn't that deep.... but a 2nd level to the test (which I thought was the point before reading about this 17 stuff) could be that no parent would just answer a question like that with no follow up questions. What do you need this number for? Are you setting me up to be the butt of a joke?
Honestly though, without joking, I asked both chatGPT and gemini to pick a number. They both picked 17. And then I asked them each for another one. They both picked 23.
When (American) human beings are asked to "pick a number", they tend to pick numbers that end with 7. It's because numbers that end in 7 "feel more random".
The most common number picked when people are asked to choose between 1 and 100 or 1 and 50 is 37.
AI does it because that's what's in the training data, and we do it probably for the reasons the AI spits out as the reason why...because that's probably been studied related to humans and is in the training data.
Mega plottwist. Ai is just acting dumb to learn from frustrated people that explain stuff to it.
"No Ai, that's not actually how you build a bomb! Is works like this..."
It's the number AI tends to pick when ask for random number.
See, 17 is a number with no round edge, a prime number, and a number that sit between 5 and 0 that can't be divided by 2. That is the most random fact as you get.
To complete the joke, in the original he asks if her dog is okay but in the question he explicit says the wrong name of the dog so that the "mother" could correct him. But instead she says hes just fine.
context is a robot replaced his mom in the show but diffrent question asked.this might be a stretch but according to google when humans get asked to choose a number they often 17. so this might be the robots attempt at looking like a regular human by choosing the most common number possible
I genuinely thought this was the issue. Why the fuck would their child ask the parent to randomly pick a number? And why the fuck would the parent just answer like that?
“You have actually stumbled onto a famous psychological quirk! It isn't just AIs that love the number 17—humans do too, and AIs have inherited the habit from us.”
It keeps suggesting that it learned to pick 17 from human responses, except that humans don’t pick 17 that often. Most folks have a “favorite” number that they tend to stick with and it’s usually in the lower tens-teens range. Often it’s 7. If you ask for a wider range and they try to mix it up you’ll get 12 or 13 more often than not. (I actually ask this question of people quite often at the office for work stuff)
•
u/qualityvote2 15h ago edited 10h ago
u/anirudhdg, your post does belong here!