[fhd2]

> This was McKinsey & Company — a firm with world-class technology teams [...]

Not exactly the word on the street in my experience. Is McKinsey more respected for software than I thought? Otherwise I'm curious why TFA didn't just politely leave this bit out.

[aerhardt]

The LLM that wrote this simply couldn’t help itself.

[codechicago277]

Picked up a vibe, but couldn’t confirm it until the last paragraph, but yeah clearly drafted with at least major AI help.

[vanillameow]

Can we stop softening the blow? This isn't "drafted with at least major AI help", it's just straight up AI slop writing. Let's call a spade a spade. I have yet to meet anyone claiming they "write with AI help but thoughts are my own" that had anything interesting to say. I don't particularly agree with a lot of Simon Willison's posts but his proofreading prompt should pretty much be the line on what constitutes acceptable AI use for writing.

https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

Grammar check, typo check, calls you out on factual mistakes and missing links and that's it. I've used this prompt once or twice for my own blog posts and it does just what you expect. You just don't end up with writing like this post by having AI "assistance" - you end up with this type of post by asking Claude, probably the same Claude that found the vulnerability to begin with, to make the whole ass blog post. No human thought went into this. If it did, I strongly urge the authors to change their writing style asap.

"So we decided to point our autonomous offensive agent at it. No credentials. No insider knowledge. And no human-in-the-loop. Just a domain name and a dream."

Give me a fucking break

[skybrian]

Your reaction is worse than the article. There's no way you could know for sure what their writing process was, but that doesn't stop you from making overconfident claims.

[theredbeard]

I’m sorry but no attempt was made here. It contains all the red flags in the first few paragraphs.

[yomismoaqui]

Sorry but seems like most people don't care or even like AI writing more:

https://x.com/kevinroose/status/2031397522590282212

[toraway]

That's the problem with AI writing in a nutshell. In a blind, relatively short comparison (similarly used for RLHF), AI writing has a florid, punchy quality that intuitively feels like high quality writing.

But then after you read the exact same structure a dozen times a day on the web, it becomes like nails on the chalkboard. It's a combination of "too much of a good thing" with little variation throughout a long piece of prose, and basic pattern recognition of AI output from a model coalescing to a consistent style that can be spotted as if 1-3 human ghost writers wrote 1/4 of the content on the web.

[beepbooptheory]

One thing I've learned recently is a lot guys (like here) have been out here reading each word of a given company's tech blog, closely parsing each sentence construction.. I really cant imagine being even concious of the prose for something like this. A corporate blog, to me, has some base level of banality to it. It's like reading a cereal box and getting angry at the lack of nuance.

Like who cares? Is there really some nostalgia for a time before this? When reading some press release from a cybersecurity company was akin to Joyce or Nabakov or whatever? (Maybe Hemingway...)

We really gotta be picking our battles here imo, and this doesn't feel like a high priority target. Let companies be the weird inhuman things that they are.

Read a novel! They are great, I promise. Then when you read other stuff, maybe you won't feel so angry?

[vanillameow]

I've picked up reading again over the last year or so! Maybe, if anything, that is why I feel so angry. Writing and reading are how we communicate thoughts and ideas between people, humans, at scale. A grand fantasy novel evokes a thirst for adventure, a romance evokes a yearning for true love.

What makes me angry, is to use the feelings we associate with this process and disingenuously pretend that there is a human that wants to tell me something, just for it to be generated drivel.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind reading AI content, but it should read like this: "Our AI agent 'hacked' (found unexposed API endpoints) x or y company, we asked it to summarize and here's what it said:" - now I know I am about to read generated content, and I can decide myself if I want to engage with it or not. Do you ever notice how nobody that uses AI writing does this? If using AI to produce creative media, including art, music, videos, and writing, is so innocuous, why do all the "AI creatives" so desperately want to hide it from you? Because they don't want you to know that it's generated. Their literal goal is to pretend to have a deeper understanding, a better outlook, on a given topic, than they actually have. I think it is sad for them to feel the need to do this, and sad for me to have to use my limited lifespan discerning it. That is why I am angry.

Anyway, there's no need to "closely parse each sentence construction" at all to identify this post is fully AI generated. It's about as clear as they come. If you have trouble identifying that, well, in the short term you're probably at a disadvantage. In the long term, if AI does ever become able to fully mimic human expression, it won't matter anyway, I guess.

ps: FWIW, I agree with you that of all places, some random AI company with an AI generated website reporting on their AI pentesting with AI is the least surprising thing - the entire company is slop, and it's very easy to see that. My initial post was more of a projection at the dozens of posts I've read from personal blogs in recent weeks where I had to carefully decide if someone's writing that they publish under their own name actually contains original thought or not.

[beepbooptheory]

Ah well I guess you are on the right side of this either way! No need to even explain. It seems that people really really do care, and its wrong to say maybe its ok that they don't have to in this case. I guess I get it, I am generally more wrong the right anyway, and yes, at the very least, I am clearly in some way sub literate and uncritical as a reader, who can't tell the difference anyway. Not really the guy to be giving his opinion here. I will go find some slop to enjoy while the adults figure out the important stuff! Thanks for teaching me the lesson here.

[nprateem]

> Why this matters

Hello Gemini

[theredbeard]

A vibe? It’s completely obvious AI slop with no attempt to make it legible. They didn’t even prompt out the emdashes. For such a cool finding this is extremely disappointing.

[lenerdenator]

> Not exactly the word on the street in my experience.

Depends on the street you're on. Are you on Main Street or Wall Street?

If you're hiring them to help with software for solving a business problem that will help you deliver value to your customers, they're probably just like anyone else.

If you're hiring them to help with software for figuring out how to break down your company for scrap, or which South African officials to bribe, well, that's a different matter.

[alexpotato]

They generally hire smart people who are good at a combination of:

- understanding existing systems

- what the paint points are

- making suggestions on how to improve those systems given the paint points

- that includes a mix of tech changes, process updates and/or new systems etc

Now, when it comes to implementing this, in my experience it usually ends up being the already in place dev teams.

Source: worked at a large investment bank that hired McKinsey and I knew one of the consultants from McK prior to working at the bank.

[xpe]

My take*: McKinsey hiring largely selects for staying calm under pressure and presenting a confident demeanor to clients. Verbal fluency with decision-making frameworks goes a long way. Having strong analytical skills seemed essential; hopefully the bar for "sufficiently analytical" has raised along with general data science skills in industry.

I don't view them as top-tier experts in their own right, whether it be statistics or technology, but they have a knack for corporate maneuvering. I often question their overall value beyond the usual "hire the big guns to legitimize a change" mentality. Maybe a useful tradeoff? I'd rather see herd-like adoption of current trends than widespread corporate ignorance and insularity.**

A huge selling point for M&Co is kind of a self-fulfulling prophecy based on the access they get. This gives them a positive feedback loop to find the juiciest and most profitable areas to focus on.

For those who know more, how do my takes compare?

* I interviewed with them over 15 years ago, know people who have worked there, and I pay attention to their reports from time to time.

** Of course, I'd rather see a third way: cross-pollination between organizations to build strong internal expertise and use model-based decision making for nuanced long-term decisions... but that's just crazy talk.

[alexpotato]

> Having strong analytical skills seemed essential

and

> they have a knack for corporate maneuvering

One way to view this is that the above combination of skills is both rare and very useful. That means it's expensive. So instead of hiring someone like that at "full rate" and keeping them around, you can "borrow" them from McK to solve a problem your regular crew can't (or isn't able to) for various reasons.

Plus, as one manager of mine said many years ago:

"We use consultants b/c they are both easy to hire AND easy to fire"

[sharadov]

No, they don't have world class technology teams, they hire contractors to do all the tech stuff, their expertise is in management, yes that's world class.

[OvervCW]

Yes, world class in causing human suffering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7pgDmR-pWg

[cmiles8]

Is it though? Managing teams to not torpedo your company with stupid stuff like this is kinda core to “good management.” The evidence would indicate they’re not very good at that either.

[theredbeard]

It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. They’re extremely expensive so they must be good so they must be worth it. And because at that level measurement is extremely subjective it’s mainly about the vibes.

Like everything it’s just marketing.

[linhns]

They were good. Not so good now.