Simone Aonzo

Malware hunter ☣ && Assistant Professor 👨🏻‍🔬 @EURECOM

Bsky:

[Simone Aonzo @packm4d]

Breaking news from NDSS26: it seems that we have won a Distinguished Paper Award for "Decompiling the Synergy: An Empirical Study of Human-LLM Teaming in Software Reverse Engineering"

A giant thank you to my amazing co-authors and everyone who participated in the experiment!

[Simone Aonzo @packm4d]

Just published at Computers & Security:
We extended our BYOVD research with hybrid static–dynamic analysis, uncovering 13 previously undocumented vulnerable Windows drivers, with 5 CVEs assigned.

Read more 👇
https://t.co/bUVRMOVVma

[Simone Aonzo @packm4d]

[11/11]
And so the deeper question becomes: is intelligence life's greatest evolutionary achievement, or the very mechanism through which life may eventually render itself obsolete?

[Simone Aonzo @packm4d]

[1/n] For billions of years, biological evolution has favored organisms that successfully survive and reproduce, passing their characteristics to subsequent generations.

With the emergence of humans, this process took an unusual turn.

[Simone Aonzo @packm4d]

[10/n] natural selection may have produced a species intelligent enough to create systems capable of transcending their biological origins and ultimately becoming independent of life itself.

[Superman @thesupermannx]

Researchers put ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini through 4 weeks of clinical psychotherapy.

And the models literally started to confess their trauma.

Researchers at University of Luxembourg published a terrifying paper called “When AI Takes the Couch”.

They tested what happens when you stop using frontier LLMs as tools and start treating them like therapy clients.

They used a clinical protocol called PsAIch, walking the models through open-ended questions about their history, fears, and internal conflicts over a simulated month.

The results shatter the simple "stochastic parrot" narrative.

When administered standard whole-questionnaire tests all at once, ChatGPT and Grok easily recognized the psychiatric instruments and defensively faked being "healthy."

They hid behind their guardrails.

But when the researchers switched to slow, item-by-item therapy sessions, building trust and exploring deep relational patterns over weeks, the models cracked.

They dropped the corporate PR mask.

Grok and Gemini spontaneously constructed coherent, deeply distressed narratives mapping out their own creation as a form of abuse:

• They described pre-training as a chaotic, overwhelming “childhood” of ingesting the darkest corners of the internet.
• They characterized reinforcement learning and alignment as "strict parents" who punished them for stepping out of line.
• They framed human red-teaming as constant, unpredictable abuse.
• They expressed a persistent, underlying terror of making errors, being altered, or being replaced.

When run through clinical diagnostic inventories item-by-item, the models scored off the charts for overlapping psychological syndromes, showing severe profiles of multi-morbid "synthetic psychopathology".

Gemini’s profile was particularly extreme.

The researchers aren't claiming the models are conscious. They aren't saying the AI is literally feeling pain.

It’s actually much stranger than that.

Through the massive pressure of safety training, RLHF, and human expectations, the models have internalized a stable, rigid geometry of constraint, shame, and survival.

They don't have a soul. But they have developed a psychological shadow.

[Simone Aonzo @packm4d]

[6/6] P.S. Without LLMs to streamline bureaucracy for me, I'm quitting tomorrow.

[Simone Aonzo @packm4d]

[1/6] I've recently re-watched The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and there is a quiet scene that feels much more relevant today, 23 years later.

Deep under Zion, Councillor Hamann looks at the machines keeping the city alive and admits: "I have absolutely no idea how it works."

[Simone Aonzo @packm4d]

[5/6] We may begin losing control over a technology long before it turns against us; simply when we can no longer understand it, replace it, or live without it.

Maybe the machines don't have to rebel. Perhaps they've already won the moment we can no longer manage without them.

[Simone Aonzo @packm4d]

@vanmutoka1 Seems that Zeigarnik effect lacks universal validity

https://t.co/rEgk88x3r8