For 35 years, amateur and professional cryptographers have tried to break the code CryptosThe majestic sculpture that stands behind the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Virginia. In the 1990s, the CIA, the Supreme Administrative Court and IT specialist Rand Corporation independently came up with a translation for three of the four panels with divine letters. But the final segment, known as K4, was coded with Knottier techniques and remains unsolved. This failure only has deepened the obsession out of thousands of would -be crypalizers. When one of them thinks he has an answer, he writes to Jim Sanborna to confirm. Sanborn is an artist who created an installation and the only person who knows the answer. Recently, the pace has increased. And Sanborn is rejected – although not for the reasons that he might think.
Consider e-mail from one recent would-be coder. “What took 35 years, and even the Supreme Administrative Court with all their resources, I could not do in just 3 hours before I drank morning coffee,” it began before the writer showed Sanborn, which they considered a cosmically elusive solution. “History is prescribed,” wrote the submiter. “Lack of 100% cracked errors.” You can ask what allows someone to believe that they would surpass the most elite mathematicians and cryptologists in the world have a quantum computer in the basement? The answer is pure 2025: Chatbot!
It turns out that the current generation of AI models willingly accepts hints aimed at solving cryptos, inventing a decoded message in Plaintext and declaring victory. Sanborn says he sees it more and more. Of course, the writer’s “solution” was bad, as thousands of Sanborn had affected earlier.
Sanborn recently contacted me to express his disgust with this development. “This seems a serious change,” he says. “The Book of Numbers [of submissions] They increased dramatically. And the character of e -Mail is different – people who crack in AI code are completely convinced that they burst into crypto during breakfast! It seems that AI lies them, telling each of them that there is 99.99% certain that they broke the crypto, congratulations. So everyone is very convinced that before they reach me, they broke it. “
Sanborn is worried in several ways. Until recently, there was an unspoken agreement between the artist and the faithful of Kryptos that the efforts to break the code would be taken seriously. (A few years ago Sanborn started Downloading 50 USD To view the solutions, ensuring the speed of filtering wild guesses and cases of nuts.) The fact that forward and rear gave the artistic nature of cryptos; Having an object that is contrary to the solution in the CIA yard is a subversive commentary on the aspect of the Funhouse-Mirror intelligence, in which every truth is doubtful. The fact that thousands of people have put in a huge effort to reveal this text – what, thinking on the basis Existing decoded panels, He indicates that the message of Sanborn is a gloss of the secret. The newcomers seem to have no sense of this complexity.
“A crowd of people trying to break cryptos today has no idea what cryptos is,” says Sanborn. He stores e -Mile with randos, using AI abbreviations that require little thought and knowledge, not to mention the recognition of this challenge. It’s like saying that you scaled Everest, driving a helicopter to the summit-but worse, because your cube battles did not solve the code at all. They barely climbed the sea level. Sometimes Sanborn does not refrain from response. “I am sure to conclude that you used artificial intelligence,” he told one erroneous lost. “Ai is lying and there is not enough information.”