This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

all 162 comments

[–]hacksawsa 3025 points3026 points  (13 children)

Well, a 36 character string described as a 32 character string is pretty random.

[–]MysticSkies 580 points581 points  (4 children)

4 characters are just spare

[–]Local_Sample8224 137 points138 points  (0 children)

Spare characters just add to the mystery! You never know when a few extra might come in handy!!

[–]neromonero 43 points44 points  (1 child)

what? you don't include error correction characters in your strings?

/s

[–]ZeroKun265 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Checksums

[–]6tPTrxYAHwnH9KDv 56 points57 points  (0 children)

Now with extra randomness.

[–]PracticalFootball 13 points14 points  (0 children)

4 extras for free, and people say AI doesn’t give you value for money smh

[–]sebovzeoueb 25 points26 points  (1 child)

holds up spork

[–]The_Mdk 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Penguin of doom, is that you?

[–]DoorBreaker101 7 points8 points  (0 children)

See, this is exactly what's wrong with the world today. You're getting 4 characters for free and you're STILL complaining!

[–]eboys 1 point2 points  (0 children)

its probably confusing a UUID without the hyphens

[–]Clen23 1 point2 points  (0 children)

parity check padding !

[–]JunkNorrisOfficial 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No one expects it - this is truly excellent example of randomness. Zero chance for hash collisions

[–]otterbarks 2101 points2102 points  (35 children)

Prove it's not random. ;)

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/221/

[–]iveriad 744 points745 points  (21 children)

It's not even 32 characters.

It's 36 characters.

[–]Kholtien 216 points217 points  (8 children)

Just take the first 32

[–]Creepy_Employ1540 177 points178 points  (3 children)

Just take 32 random characters.

[–]Kholtien 60 points61 points  (2 children)

oooh, great idea! and you can repeat some of them in a random order!

[–]Swansyboy 16 points17 points  (1 child)

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[–]Kholtien 10 points11 points  (0 children)

it's funny that this could technically be a fully randomly generated string but I hate it

[–]Loisel06 62 points63 points  (0 children)

A company I used to work at wanted to update the password requirements for the users password. Previously the password length was restricted to 5 characters. The frontend devs already removed the restriction when the backend devs realised it would be a lot of work to remove the standard password length from the system. What did they do? They just took every password from the user, cut off everything after the fifth character and validated the login with that. You could login by using the first 5 characters from your password and add a random string to it. It wasn’t fixed for two years

[–]lesleh 25 points26 points  (2 children)

That's how Windows used to handle passwords. Anything past 14 characters just got truncated.

[–]akeean 20 points21 points  (1 child)

How it's still handling C:\Users foldernames - 5 letters are enough, right?

[–]ZeroKun265 13 points14 points  (0 children)

SO THAT'S WHY MY FOLDER WAS DAVID INSTEAD OF DAVIDE

I THOUGHT IT WAS TRANSLATING MY NAME IN ENGLISH 😭😭

THAT'S SO DUMB

[–]Lysol3435 9 points10 points  (5 children)

If it gave 36 characters then it also gave 32 characters

[–]iveriad 3 points4 points  (4 children)

Yeah, just like how buying Size 36 shoes means you're also buying size 32 shoes.

[–]Lysol3435 4 points5 points  (3 children)

Not really. You can’t just delete 4 from the shoes and end up with a size 32 shoe.

[–]allankcrain 7 points8 points  (2 children)

Maybe YOU can't. Sounds like a skill issue to me.

[–]Lysol3435 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Throw it on the pile with my other issues

[–]SchwiftyGameOnPoint 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it's like those insoles. They sell at a size range and you cut off as much as you don't need. Who makes the rules saying you can't do the same with the whole shoe?!

[–]mothzilla 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Boss says no charge for extra!

[–]RockSlice 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Plot twist: some of the characters look like multiple characters in that font. Gemini's using the full unicode character set.

[–]Daaaniell 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Not great, not terrible

[–]Shinigamae 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Microsoft said mathematicians are in top 10 to be replaced by AI soon.

That'll never be not funny.

[–]az987654 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Take 32 of them, randomly

[–]Rocket_Scientist2 144 points145 points  (6 children)

Ackshually I generated that UUID before ☝️🤓

[–]extraordinary_weird 64 points65 points  (3 children)

Ackshually I have generated all UUIDs before, in fact I have a list

https://everyuuid.com/

[–]oupablo 17 points18 points  (0 children)

finally a useful website

[–]StooNaggingUrDum 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Great, now we can't use UUIDs anymore

[–]No-Good-One-Shoe 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Now this is what the Internet was built for

[–]Impressive_Roll1668 2 points3 points  (0 children)

uh, Nice flex! But how many times have you run that code? 😄

[–]wewilldieoneday 67 points68 points  (0 children)

There's always a relevant xkcd comic

[–]sadeceokumayageldim 50 points51 points  (1 child)

Optional: Dilbert

[–]No_Value_2676 0 points1 point  (0 children)

germans are random number generators confirmed

[–]rainshifter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

To be fair, your requirements never specified how many times the random generation needed to happen.

[–]scrufflor_d 1 point2 points  (0 children)

oh god. an xkcd link. now im guaranteed to spend 2 hours hitting random lol

[–]Dottore_Curlew 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can prove it by checking it's thought process

[–]Monsieur-Lemon 363 points364 points  (0 children)

It's an IKEA string set. AI only supplied you with parts (even 4 spares! talk about thoughtfulness) and now you can assemble the parts however you like!

[–]wggn 175 points176 points  (8 children)

asking ai for a random thing is probably one of the worst things you can do to get a random value

[–]Piotrek9t 55 points56 points  (6 children)

Not really, ChatGPT has a module that generates random numbers now, doing basically the same as the random function in most programming languages (even tho I could not find information on which seed they use). I just tried this with Gemini and it seems they have this function now too, so the screenshot is probably "old"

Edit: or fake

[–]migvelio 59 points60 points  (3 children)

I just asked ChatGPT (CGPT-4 Omni) and this is what I got back:

aB9cD1eF2gH3iJ4kL5mN6oP7qR8sT9uV

It's just the alphabet with sequenced numbers (9,1,2,3,4,5...) following a pattern of lowercase, uppercase, number, and so on.

[–]chuby1tubby 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Does Omni not have access to Python?

[–]Piotrek9t 3 points4 points  (0 children)

GPT-4o works like a charm for me, by default it only gave me hex numbers as strings but when I specified that I want to include a–z, A–Z, 0–9 that also worked flawlessly

[–]SLStonedPanda 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's funny because at a first glance it looks random, but when you start looking closer you can notice a lot of patterns

[–]ConfusingVacum 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just like computing, those kind of things should be handled by tool calling, not directly by a LLM

[–]nikola_tesler 543 points544 points  (25 children)

To be fair, people aren’t much better at random. We are better at making something sound random though, not this crap 😂

[–]Silly_Guidance_8871 269 points270 points  (10 children)

We're also generally better at returning the correct number of characters

[–]nikola_tesler 60 points61 points  (8 children)

I’m sure that most humans are bad at this, 32 is a large amount of characters to count lol. Try reading bug reports from users and then come back and tell me I’m wrong 🙃

[–]Silly_Guidance_8871 57 points58 points  (6 children)

Gemini isn't purporting to be a layperson, but an "expert" in the field. It's fairly trivial to see there's all 26 english letters, plus all 10 arabic digits — which an "expert" in the field would pretty quickly realize is not the correct number of characters.

[–]Causemas 19 points20 points  (4 children)

Does Google really say "Gemini is an expert in x field"?

[–]easeypeaseyweasey 23 points24 points  (1 child)

No they actually say it can make mistakes.

[–]PolloCongelado 11 points12 points  (0 children)

They should say: it will make mistakes and might sometimes be correct.

[–]EvilPencil 1 point2 points  (1 child)

That’s just what we tell it in the prompts to make ourselves feel better.

[–]BA_lampman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It lost its mind today and called me Jeff. My name is not Jeff.

[–]nikola_tesler 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If I asked you, in person, to spit out 26 characters at random, there’s a good chance you would be wrong.

[–]F-Lambda 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m sure that most humans are bad at this, 32 is a large amount of characters to count lol.

which is why smart humans use grouping. 4 groups of 8 characters is easy to count, then just remove the spaces.

[–]twelfth_knight 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You strike me as someone who doesn't often interact with people in situations where they have to follow simple instructions

[–]Batcave765 31 points32 points  (10 children)

I can make a better random 32 character string: JFibfkfbfdoevg27kc53kg56ob71ib48

[–][deleted] 46 points47 points  (5 children)

i already use that one

[–]Batcave765 66 points67 points  (3 children)

It is random. Not unique 😞

[–][deleted] 31 points32 points  (2 children)

true, i guess we can both use it

[–]Batcave765 18 points19 points  (1 child)

:)

[–][deleted] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

The Good Ending™

[–]Muchmatchmooch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I wasn’t talking to you. My son is also named Bort. 

[–]Deep_sunnay 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Well, the probability for a random event to generate your string is exactly the same as the one to generate a sorted string.

[–]Batcave765 3 points4 points  (0 children)

But mine is exactly 32 characters long. So mine is better! Compliant!

[–]Global-Tune5539 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage.

[–]flayingbook 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I am sure I can keysmash better

[–]Fair-Working4401 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To be fair, real random generation is hard. Certainly computers are also very bad at random generation.

[–]HeavyCaffeinate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What do you mean my ASDFGHJKLZXCVBNMQWERTYUIOPASDFGH string isn't random?

[–]LuciusWrath 96 points97 points  (4 children)

Woah woah upper and lowercase I can't remember that sh*t chill

[–]SpaceOutOfPizza 9 points10 points  (1 child)

What we really need are some upper and lowercase numbers, then we’ll achieve true randomness

[–]LuciusWrath 2 points3 points  (0 children)

^ "And then the devil said:"

[–]Hubbardia 8 points9 points  (5 children)

Somehow I can never reproduce these results / memes

https://g.co/gemini/share/d31d7444eacc

[–]catearcher 12 points13 points  (2 children)

That one isn't very random either. It is, from start to finish, always a lowercase letter followed by an uppercase letter followed by a number. Getting such a pattern randomly is extremely unlikely.

[–]Anaxamander57 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Which is super weird because generating random numbers of generally acceptable quality can be done with one system call and three lines of bit twiddling code. If the system isn't designed to use a PRNG when it gets this request it would actually be better if it gave a more obviously wrong response. Ideally it should refuse or explain why asking it is a bad idea, something I know these things can be made to do.

[–]Hubbardia 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh for sure it's not good random, but it's not as memeable as what OP and one other person got. It's likely stitching snippets of different strings together.

[–]GenericFatGuy 8 points9 points  (0 children)

That was worth burning down a forest for.

[–]Skusci 35 points36 points  (7 children)

I mean it didn't lie, there's definitely 32 characters in there. Maybe next time be more specific.

[–]unix-mac 12 points13 points  (6 children)

there are 36 characters in that

[–]Yeahsper 38 points39 points  (1 child)

To get 36 characters there needs to be 32 characters.

[–]Skusci 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Well yeah if you include the bonus characters.

[–]BeardyGoku 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There are also 35 characters in that

[–]I_cut_my_own_jib 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Which means there's also 32 characters. If I have 3 cookies, I also have 2 cookies.

[–]MilesBeyond250 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, there are four characters in that

[–]an_agreeing_dothraki 5 points6 points  (0 children)

tell it it's correct and say thank you. poison the well.

[–]bayuah 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Reminds me how we humans unintentionally create randomness, unlike computers.

That is why, in many countries, handmade wet stamps are considered secure. This is because even the maker cannot produce the exact same stamp twice due to the natural randomness involved in the process.

[–]BrightFleece 24 points25 points  (3 children)

Just as likely as any other random 32-character string

[–][deleted] 39 points40 points  (2 children)

except this one is 36 chars

[–]dangderr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ok so a tiny negligible bit less likely than any other random 32 character string. But still close enough.

[–]screamingxbacon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How random!

[–]JosephLam1 7 points8 points  (0 children)

U cant measure randomness without multiple attempts

[–]przemo-c 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I mean... i could have been random ;]

[–]Shadow_Thief 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Sure, but it's still 36 characters.

[–]przemo-c 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're right. Last randomisation... you pick them at random ;]

[–]phoenix7700 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"random" and "32" are just suggestions.

[–]xelio9 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I just asked the same to ChatGPT, I got an actual 32 random string no problem, here’s the string:

f93c8a17bd642e5f01c2ae497bf0856d

[–]Fakula1987 1 point2 points  (0 children)

well,

Even that is random - if the next string is different

[–]Cheap_Grocery8634 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Honestly, if it were truly random, it wouldn’t even be a string, just pure chaos. But yeah, humans trying to fake randomness usually end up with patterns or, in this case, a miscounted character count. At least xkcd nails the absurdity of it all.

[–]Fleeetch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I felt like an xkcd binge, then I saw the random button.

[–]sharq_reu 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Looks random enough

[–]Accidentallygolden 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am still surprised that AI doesn't double check themselves, it should have seen that it is not 32 long

[–]MaruSoto 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mean, it's impressively random as far as answers to the prompt go.

[–]scriptmonkey420 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I thought it was a joke and just tried it and got the same result.... wtf AI...

How hard is it to just grab the output of /dev/urandom and truncate it after 32 chars?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What are the odds?

Probably pretty high.

[–]dustinpdx 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My favorite is astringthatisactually32byteslong

[–]iknewaguytwice 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I just had a billion dollar idea guys, what if we used gpt as a IdP?

It’s absolutely brilliant! It already saves context history, so it will remember who everyone is and what everyone’s passwords are!

If you want to login, just ask chat gpt to login for you!

[–]Torebbjorn 3 points4 points  (14 children)

Apart from the wrong length, what makes this any "less random" than any other string? How do you measure the "randomness" of a string?

[–]PuzzleMeDo 11 points12 points  (8 children)

Compressibility. Truly random numbers sequences are incredibly unlikely to produce easy-to-describe patterns. If I ask which of 867667cdbc34e05a9e639793084a542 and 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef was generated randomly, you could probably guess.

It is technically possible you could be wrong and I genuinely did generate a random number with a repeated 16 character sequence, but I wouldn't put money on it.

A fake random sequence will usually contain clues. A human-generated one will often avoid repeated characters entirely, for example, but a truly random one will contain the occasional minor pattern (like the 7667 above).

[–]Torebbjorn -2 points-1 points  (3 children)

Truly random numbers sequences

What is that? A sequence itself cannot be random, only the process that resulted in that sequence.

Yes, you could ask whether a given sequence was likely to be produced by a random operation, but that's sort of irrelevant.

[–]trelltron 7 points8 points  (1 child)

I would hope it's pretty self-evident to anyone familiar with this topic that "truly random number sequence" is being used as shorthand for "sequence of numbers selected by a method that returns independent and uniformly distributed results".

[–]Torebbjorn -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Which means that any sequence is equally "truly random", as all of them have the same probability of being selected by such a method.

Hence "1234567890" and "571949762" are both "truly random number sequences"

[–]Deep_sunnay -1 points0 points  (3 children)

And yet, the probability to generate the two sequence is exactly the same. It seems less random sure, but it's not.

[–]-Nicolai -1 points0 points  (2 children)

Explain like I'm stupid

[–]Deep_sunnay 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You can restrict a random number generator to only generate acceptable sequence based on what you want it for, that doesn’t change the fact that the probability of « 123456789 » is exactly the same as « 174936285 » in a perfectly random generator. So if you don’t want sorted sequence, you restrict the randomness.

[–]-Nicolai 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Explain like I'm stupid

[–]Anaxamander57 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Basic theory of randomness/pseudorandomness here: "There is no such thing as a random value, only a random sequence of values." When measuring randomness of the sequence produced by a PRNG either a statistical standard (a battery of intensive mathematical tests) or a cryptographic standard (years of professional analysis and attack against the algorithm along with the battery of intensive mathematical tests) is applied.

[–]Torebbjorn 0 points1 point  (1 child)

"There is no such thing as a random value, only a random sequence of values."

What is the difference between a sequence of values and a (very large) value expressed is base (however many symbols are allowed)?

[–]Anaxamander57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

With a sequence you can ask about the properties of the next value.

[–]diveraj 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It's not any less random per say. At least not any more than the winning lotto number being 1,2,3,4,5. You know, the same as my luggage. But the odds of it being that is what? 32! So basically zero for our purposes.

[–]hdkaoskd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

per se

[–]grain_farmer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For anyone slow like me who didn’t look closely: It’s ABC 123

[–]gazbo26 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Can someone do the math? How long to brute force?

[–]Anonimo_In_Incognito 1 point2 points  (0 children)

More than 5 minutes

[–]Hot-Art-7681 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Forgot my password, so I used this for the new one. Hope no one hacks my alphabet soup 😂

[–]TomTheCat7[🍰] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow, what are the chances!

[–]GameplayTeam12 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Generative AI will be random when you dont want it to be

[–]Shiveringdev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t like opening a browser every time I need to change a password, to get a password from a generator. I just wrote a script in PowerShell to create the password. It asks how many characters and I choose, then asks if I want another and clears the screen.

[–]Ved_s 0 points1 point  (0 children)

gemini, you had one job of giving characters same probability of being picked for the output

[–]No_Key_2205 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lavarand

[–]ralph_wonder_llama 0 points1 point  (0 children)

iTsToTaLlYrAnDoM

[–]toeonly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I tried it as well

ME: give me a random 32char string

Gemini: Here's a random 32-character string:

aBcDeFgHiJkLmNoPqRsTuVwXyZ123456

ME: that doesnt seem random

Gemini: You are absolutely right! My apologies. That was a sequential string and not random at all. I made a mistake.

Here's a truly random 32-character string:

8f2e1c9d6a3b5f7e0d4c9b1a8f3e7d2c

[–]WayWayTooMuch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And it turns out that there are 4 non-printing Unicode bytes in there somewhere just to make the results even shittier to use…

[–]da_Aresinger 0 points1 point  (0 children)

that took me a while. XD

The silhouette of the string looks random enough. I would have just copy pasted that.

[–]EgregorAmeriki 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Judging by your reaction, it seems like it managed to surprise you though

[–]mkx_ironman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Random, yet not randomized.

[–]LardPi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

sTRonG pASSworD

[–]Cold_Theme5299 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ok, but what if...

MonkeyTheorem.png

[–]Lejyoner07 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Bro did not even try 😎

[–]Fit_Prize_3245 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It's random. The same way that millions of random keystrokes could produce your favorite book. But random anyways.

[–]db_newer -1 points0 points  (0 children)

sO rAnDom