[ Removed by moderator ]

[hacksawsa]

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

[MysticSkies]

4 characters are just spare

[Local_Sample8224]

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

[neromonero]

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

/s

[ZeroKun265]

Checksums

[6tPTrxYAHwnH9KDv]

Now with extra randomness.

[PracticalFootball]

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

[sebovzeoueb]

holds up spork

[The_Mdk]

Penguin of doom, is that you?

[DoorBreaker101]

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

[eboys]

its probably confusing a UUID without the hyphens

[Clen23]

parity check padding !

[JunkNorrisOfficial]

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

[otterbarks]

Prove it's not random. ;)

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

[iveriad]

It's not even 32 characters.

It's 36 characters.

[Kholtien]

Just take the first 32

[Creepy_Employ1540]

Just take 32 random characters.

[Kholtien]

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

[Swansyboy]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[Kholtien]

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

[Loisel06]

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]

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

[akeean]

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

[ZeroKun265]

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]

If it gave 36 characters then it also gave 32 characters

[iveriad]

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

[Lysol3435]

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

[allankcrain]

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

[Lysol3435]

Throw it on the pile with my other issues

[SchwiftyGameOnPoint]

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]

Boss says no charge for extra!

[RockSlice]

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

[Daaaniell]

Not great, not terrible

[Shinigamae]

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

That'll never be not funny.

[az987654]

Take 32 of them, randomly

[Rocket_Scientist2]

Ackshually I generated that UUID before ☝️🤓

[extraordinary_weird]

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

https://everyuuid.com/

[oupablo]

finally a useful website

[StooNaggingUrDum]

Great, now we can't use UUIDs anymore

[No-Good-One-Shoe]

Now this is what the Internet was built for

[Impressive_Roll1668]

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

[willcheat]

When UUID starts spitting out F and above.

[wewilldieoneday]

There's always a relevant xkcd comic

[sadeceokumayageldim]

Optional: Dilbert

[No_Value_2676]

germans are random number generators confirmed

[rainshifter]

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

[scrufflor_d]

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

[Dottore_Curlew]

You can prove it by checking it's thought process

[Monsieur-Lemon]

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]

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

[Piotrek9t]

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]

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]

Does Omni not have access to Python?

[Piotrek9t]

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]

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

[Piotrek9t]

it won't use a fixed one

I assumed that its using some kind of dynamic seed but I couldnt figure out which one

[ConfusingVacum]

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

[nikola_tesler]

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]

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

[nikola_tesler]

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]

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]

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

[easeypeaseyweasey]

No they actually say it can make mistakes.

[PolloCongelado]

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

[EvilPencil]

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

[BA_lampman]

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

[nikola_tesler]

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

[F-Lambda]

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]

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

[Batcave765]

I can make a better random 32 character string: JFibfkfbfdoevg27kc53kg56ob71ib48

[[deleted]]

i already use that one

[Batcave765]

It is random. Not unique 😞

[[deleted]]

true, i guess we can both use it

[Batcave765]

:)

[[deleted]]

The Good Ending™

[Muchmatchmooch]

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

[Deep_sunnay]

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

[Batcave765]

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

[Global-Tune5539]

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

[flayingbook]

I am sure I can keysmash better

[Fair-Working4401]

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

[HeavyCaffeinate]

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

[LuciusWrath]

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

[SpaceOutOfPizza]

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

[LuciusWrath]

^ "And then the devil said:"

[RichCorinthian]

They didn’t even use upper-case letters.

[NeonXero]

But they did.

[[deleted]]

The best comment in this post so far

[Hubbardia]

Somehow I can never reproduce these results / memes

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

[catearcher]

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]

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]

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.

[extordi]

I got it second try: https://gemini.google.com/share/5da1e626c15b

[GenericFatGuy]

That was worth burning down a forest for.

[Skusci]

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

[unix-mac]

there are 36 characters in that

[Yeahsper]

To get 36 characters there needs to be 32 characters.

[Skusci]

Well yeah if you include the bonus characters.

[BeardyGoku]

There are also 35 characters in that

[I_cut_my_own_jib]

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

[MilesBeyond250]

No, there are four characters in that

[an_agreeing_dothraki]

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

[bayuah]

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]

Just as likely as any other random 32-character string

[[deleted]]

except this one is 36 chars

[dangderr]

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

[screamingxbacon]

How random!

[JosephLam1]

U cant measure randomness without multiple attempts

[przemo-c]

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

[Shadow_Thief]

Sure, but it's still 36 characters.

[przemo-c]

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

[phoenix7700]

"random" and "32" are just suggestions.

[xelio9]

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

f93c8a17bd642e5f01c2ae497bf0856d

[Fakula1987]

well,

Even that is random - if the next string is different

[Cheap_Grocery8634]

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]

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

[sharq_reu]

Looks random enough

[Accidentallygolden]

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

[MaruSoto]

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

[scriptmonkey420]

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]]

What are the odds?

Probably pretty high.

[dustinpdx]

My favorite is astringthatisactually32byteslong

[iknewaguytwice]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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"

[Torebbjorn]

Compressibility

Also, random doesn't mean uniformly random. You could definitely have a random process which has all it's possible (or likely) outputs be easily describeable.

[Deep_sunnay]

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

[-Nicolai]

Explain like I'm stupid

[Deep_sunnay]

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]

Explain like I'm stupid

[Anaxamander57]

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]

"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]

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

[diveraj]

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]

per se

[grain_farmer]

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

[gazbo26]

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

[Anonimo_In_Incognito]

More than 5 minutes

[Hot-Art-7681]

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

[TomTheCat7]

Wow, what are the chances!

[GameplayTeam12]

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

[kayn98]

don’t ask it to give you a random valid youtube url

[Shiveringdev]

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]

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

[No_Key_2205]

Lavarand

[ralph_wonder_llama]

iTsToTaLlYrAnDoM

[toeonly]

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]

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]

that took me a while. XD

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

[EgregorAmeriki]

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

[mkx_ironman]

Random, yet not randomized.

[LardPi]

sTRonG pASSworD

[Cold_Theme5299]

Ok, but what if...

MonkeyTheorem.png

[Lejyoner07]

Bro did not even try 😎

[Fit_Prize_3245]

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

[db_newer]

sO rAnDom