Trusting software produced by others is not a new problem; I consider AI to be a tool, and so my techniques for establishing trust are the same as they have always been. I look at the person wielding the tool.

> I look at the person wielding the tool.

I look at the whole chain of influence behind them, and it's quite a lot more upsetting than the smiling face I interact with.

The whole "AI is a Lovecraftian tentacle monster wearing a smiley face" thing applies to simple bureaucracies (replace Lovecraft with Kafka), to corporations (replace Lovecraft with IDK, most anarchists?), and governments (Orwell?)

Tools made by tools made by tools, along more steps than most people know even when their job is one of them. Somewhere there's a kid working a dangerous mine without the right safety equipment, elsewhere there's a sweatshop, another place a "reeducation camp".

But who do I see? A cashier, mostly. Someone whose job involves smiling to customers even when we're idiots.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I put trust in individual people, not organizations. You seem to be making a point about supply chains, but I'm not sure how it relates to the point about trust. You seem to be making a different point about some kind of exploitation.

Almost everything I interact with was made by an organisation (or a disorganisation), not by an individual.

Say I download an app. Who made it? The programmer? Their PM? Apple's store requirements? The US government, for whom there was a special tickbox I had to agree to last time I uploaded an app?

Trust is for the mechanic, driver, builder; but for 90% of my interactions I have to trust my government set good rules and other people followed them.

I can't do this with AI, neither good rules nor them being followed, but I also can't do it when the OS company and app devs are foreign, as they generally are to me now.

Then you best hope that person has read https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/classes/cmpsci691st/readi...

How sure are you that any printer driver didn’t include a backdoor? What’s the difference between the LLM code with the backdoor and the human code with the backdoor?

The ability to audit the code.

If not that, the ability to trust the reputation of the author which creates an incentive not to willingly insert a backdoor.

Yes, `npm install` was always bullshit because most people didn't bother to check, which is exactly why it was exploited multiple times, which created a conversation about "supply chain security".

If you want to argue that "npm changed the world" then you are correct. It did not change the world for the better though.

Why is LLM code always harder to audit?

So LLMs might decide to add backdoors without prompting?

I'm less worried about what LLMs decide and more about what their system prompts tell them to do.

That's a motivation for source available. You can have commercial copyrighted software that's NUMS. You can deliver the customer source code (slightly customized for traitor-telling of course) and tell them to do what they want but never share it. grsecurity even managed this with GPL software!