Just a moment in the chaos times of the "technological singularity". Maybe a sign of things to come or maybe not.
In the space of a few hours macOS gives me a chilling warning about malware in the ChatGPT app and Perplexity loses all of my Spaces content.
The ChatGPT error message, an ai explains, is because macOS does this when an app signature is revoked, and OpenAI revoked the cert on the app because of a supply chain attack. Probably not a real problem, but also maybe a sign of things to come as hacks and supply chain attacks proliferate.
The other problem was more interesting. All Perplexity support is by ai, and their ai agents can invoke Perplexity maintenance tools. Here's the sequence:
- I sent feedback Perplexity support complaining that Perplexity's inability to change a customer email is really annoying. The workaround is that Pro customers you have to create a new account and, bye emailing support, request content transfer.
- A few minutes later all my Perplexity Spaces content was gone except the name of the Spaces.
- I complained to support that my Spaces were empty.
- Support (an ai) then used an internal tool to "restore" my content -- but all date stamp metadata was lost for both Spaces and Chat. Chats between the initial disappearance and restore were not found.
- When I complained about lost date metadata the support ai said it would escalate and any further comments on the thread would delay resolution.
I think what happened here is that Perplexity Pro Support ai treated a feedback complaint as a request for action and automatically invoked a part of their content transfer hack. That removed all my content. The Support ai then did an automated restore that doesn't actually work that well.
There will be more like this. Be very careful what you ask of an ai support agent.
