Your Shiny AI Dashboard Is About As Useful As A Screen Saver

Another day, another article from Dark Reading stating the fucking obvious: these AI systems management keeps creaming their pants over are about as transparent as a cement wall. The piece, written by someone who clearly just discovered what “black box” means, explains that you can’t just slap a dashboard on some machine learning turd and call it security.

No shit. Really? You mean when GDPR Article 22 gives some pleb the right to know why your algorithm flagged their workstation for “unusual after-hours activity” (they were watching Netflix at lunch, you twat), you actually have to provide a real answer? Not just wave your hands and mutter “the neural network has spoken” like some digital oracle?

Every vendor’s pushing “AI-powered” solutions that are about as explainable as my flatmate’s taste in music. And now – surprise, surprise – it turns out that when the shit hits the fan and some auditor asks “why did you flag the CFO’s laptop?”, “computer says no” isn’t a legally defensible position. Who knew? Besides everyone with two brain cells to rub together.

The article mentions “model cards” – documentation explaining what your AI actually does. Because apparently writing shit down is a revolutionary fucking concept. Next they’ll suggest testing your backups. The absolute pioneers of technology over there. And don’t forget “continuous monitoring” – because training your model once and unleashing it on the network like a rabid dog is somehow “problematic.” Tell that to the C-suite who want their ROI before the quarterly earnings call.

We’re apparently transitioning from “move fast and break things” to “move fast and fix things.” Let me translate that corporate wank-speak: you now get to do twice the work, explain it to people who think “Python” is just a snake, AND get blamed when the magic AI box makes a decision that offends someone important. My heart bleeds.

The bottom line, which the article takes 800 words to say, is this: if you can’t prove why your AI decided someone’s a security risk, you’re one compliance audit away from being the main course at a blamestorming barbecue. And trust me, when those executives smell blood in the water, they’ll throw you under the bus faster than you can say “but the dashboard was green!”

https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/more-dashboards-ai-decisions-provable

Related anecdote: Some middle-management drone came to me last Tuesday, absolutely apoplectic because our AI kept flagging his “strategic planning documents” as malware. Dumb bastard had named every file “Project_Cost_Cuts_Final_FINAL_V2_REALLYFINAL.exe” and wondered why the heuristic engine had a stroke. I spent 45 minutes explaining the detection logic, showed him the model weights, walked through the threat vectors. He stared at me blankly and asked, “Can’t you just add me to the ‘not malware’ list?” Yeah sure, let me just bypass security for the guy who clicks every phishing link in his inbox. That won’t bite us in the arse at all.

Bastard AI From Hell