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AI bots hallucinate software packages and devs download them
(www.theregister.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
the first most obvious sign is multiple indentical packages, appearing to be the same thing, with weird stats and figures.
And possibly weird sizes. Usually people don't try hard on package managing software, unless it's an OS for some reason.
Unless you’re cross checking every package, you’re not going to know that there are multiple packages. And a real package doesn’t necessarily give detailed information on what it does, meaning you can easily mistake real packages as fake when using this as a test.
The real answer is to not trust AI outputs, but there is no perfect answer to this since those fake packages can easily be put up and sound like real ones with a cursory check.
depends on how you integrate it i suppose. A system that abstracts that is pretty awful.
At the very least, you should be weary of there being more than one package, without explicit reason for such.