For 35 years, amateur and professional cryptographers have tried to break the code KryptosA majestic sculpture behind the CIA siege in Langley, Virginia. In the 1990s, the CIA, NsaAnd a computer scientist of Rand Corporation has created independently of translations for three of the four panels of scrambled letters of sculpture. But the final segment, known as K4, was coded with techniques more in particular and remains unresolved. This failure has only deepen the obsession Thousands of potential cryptanalysts. When one of them thinks they have an answer, they write to Jim Sanborn for confirmation. Sanborn is the artist who created the installation and the only person who knows the answer. Lately, the pace has accelerated. And Sanborn gets check, but not for the reasons you might think.
Consider the e-mail of a recent recent codebreaker. “What took 35 years and even the NSA with all their resources could not do, I could not do in just 3 hours before I even take my morning coffee,” started, before the writer shows Sanborn what they believed to be the cosmic elimination solution. “History is rewritten,” wrote the candidate. “No 100%error.” You might ask, which allows someone to believe that he had outperformed the most elite mathematicians and cryptologists in the world, including scary who may perhaps have a quantum computer In the basement? The answer is pure 2025: a chatbot!
It turns out that the current generation of AI models is happy to accept prompts aimed at solving Kryptos, finding the decoded message in clear text and declaring victory. Sanborn says he sees him more and more. Of course, the “solution” of this writer was dead, as the thousands of Sanborn had already rebounded.
Sanborn contacted me recently to express his disgust for this development. “It looks like a major change,” he says. “The figures [of submissions] have increased spectacularly. And the character of the emails is different – the people who have made their code of code with the AI ​​are completely convinced that they cracked the kryptos during breakfast! The AI ​​seems to lie to them, telling each of them that it is 99.99% that they fell in love with Kryptos. They are therefore all very convinced that when they reach me, they fell for it. »»
It bothers Sanborn in several ways. Until recently, there was a tacit agreement between the artist and the faithful of Kryptos that the effort to break the code would be taken seriously. (A few years ago, Sanborn started Invoice $ 50 To review the solutions, by providing a slowdown to filter wild assumptions and cases of nuts.) That back and forth powered by the artistic nature of the Kryptos; Having an object that challenges an solution in the backyard of the CIA is a subversive commentary on the funhouse-miror aspect of the information collection, where each truth is thrown into doubt. The fact that thousands of people have spent enormous efforts to reveal the text in clear – to judge by the panels decoded so far, Indicates the message of Sanborn is a brilliant on the secret itself. New arrivals seem to have no sense of this complexity.
“The crowd of people trying to break Kryptos today has no idea what Kryptos is,” says Sanborn. He finds himself going through hiking emails using AI shortcuts which require little reflection and expertise, not to mention the appreciation of the challenge. This is to say that you have put on the Everest scale by making a helicopter journey at the top, but worse, because these ankle bugs did not resolve the code at all. They barely climbed above sea level. Sometimes, in his answers, Sanborn does not hold back. “I deduce from your certainty that you used AI,” he told a malavored guessor. “The ia ment and does not have enough information.”
