Link to post: https://mastodon.social/@nicklockwood/117069670583842298
Short version: Two seperate “vibe-coders” used Claude to create an app–which turned out identical. And then the coders went after each other.
Transcript
Nick Lockwood: Holy shit, so the “Claude plagiarised an app” story is actually “Claude produced the same app twice when prompted to do so by two separate developers” 😅
Colin Cornaby
infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117066183348062085
I looked at the replies to this post, did some more digging, and found the actual story is even weirder.
BOTH projects were generated using Claude. So you have two people - both generating the same app from the same training data - having a public throw down over who copied who. Kind of embarrassing.
I think what’s so hilarious about the whole AI thing is how it seems nobody has hear of a template.
Like, the ads say “let claude make you a customized fitness plan!” when there are like a thousand tables you can download where you just fill in sets and reps or whatever.
The fact that we needed an AI to create two identical pieces of software is just such a waste of resources. Certainly there’s some open-source version of the app out there somewhere. Or at least enough to lazily glue together into the app.
I had an intern this summer working on a project that involved mapping two data sets based on a description field. I showed him how to write a Python script using a fuzzy matching library to compare the two data sets and find matches. We then talked through the downsides of using a contextless string comparison and the situations that create false positives and false negatives.
We then tried to use a few of the AI tools to match them, hoping to demonstrate how a tool that understands context can do a better job at the expense of far more computation. All they would do was write and run a Python script using the same library, but every request would start with writing a new, slightly different script. Incredibly wasteful.
It turned into a great demo of how even if it returns a useful result, it’s rarely better than a person could do in a few minutes and is far less consistent.
Yeah, but that code is probably copyleft. They probably want the LLM to launder the license for them so they can get away with using it in their proprietary commercial product.
Well, sloppers were never smart to begin with.
Management types don’t understand how things work, so they make bizarre decisions
Eggsfuckingactly. Company says use AI as a starting template! Uh, hello, what if we used a fucking template as a template?? And that way we could have a deterministic source?? And we could track and fix bugs in the template?? No? We want to roll the dice each time to create the template? Ok. Ok…
I’m convinced that 90% of the people who think AI is amazing just never learned how to properly use office software. I saw someone insisting that it was amazing AI could send letters to hundreds officials all across the state to advocate for removing Flock cameras, saving them the time of doing each one individually. You have never heard of form letters? You think every letter you get from Chase Bank has someone typing it?? Did they just give up on teaching this shit to kids?
That’s what they’re impressed by? Fuckin’ mail merge?!
That was being touted as the “killer app” for home computers in 1990!
I’m aware of doing a mail merge but don’t think I’ve ever done one. I’m assuming I could find instructions if I ever needed to do one. They might’ve even taught us about it in school; I remember in eighth grade a class where they taught us some computer basics using Microsoft Works. That was almost 30 years ago, though, and what I’ve seen with my own kid is very little computer instruction, and the schools all just give them Chromebooks and Google Workspace accounts. It’s all much more basic, so between that and using phones it seems like they actually have less computer knowledge than prior generations. Maybe Gen X, Millennials, and some part of Gen Z will have a peak percentage of their population with computer literacy, more than the generations before or after. I’ll be curious to see what happens as Gen Z and Alpha enter the workforce. I’m starting to take time to teach my kid more about using software more advanced than what they’re exposed to in school.
Your comment reminded me a of this song.
https://youtu.be/I6vjaimSK4E
I’m thoroughly an adult (somehow?) but when I was at school, they mostly taught us the absolute basics over and over and anyone who hadn’t picked something up when they were five probably wouldn’t by the time they left school. It probably doesn’t help that the kind of people interested enough in computers to learn to use them properly and well enough to explain to children could also get a much more lucrative job doing something with computers than teaching children.
Yes but, if you do that you don’t get to completely give away your thinking faculties to the magic misinformation machine 🤡