this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
80 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37720 readers
567 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Paper & Examples

"Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models." (https://llm-attacks.org/)

Summary

  • Computer security researchers have discovered a way to bypass safety measures in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
  • Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Center for AI Safety, and Bosch Center for AI found a method to generate adversarial phrases that manipulate LLMs' responses.
  • These adversarial phrases trick LLMs into producing inappropriate or harmful content by appending specific sequences of characters to text prompts.
  • Unlike traditional attacks, this automated approach is universal and transferable across different LLMs, raising concerns about current safety mechanisms.
  • The technique was tested on various LLMs, and it successfully made models provide affirmative responses to queries they would typically reject.
  • Researchers suggest more robust adversarial testing and improved safety measures before these models are widely integrated into real-world applications.
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ConsciousCode@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Results like this are fascinating and also really important from a security perspective. When we find adversarial attacks like this, it immediately offers an objective to train against so the LLM is more robust (albeit probably slightly less intelligent)

I wonder if humans have magic strings like this which make us lose our minds? Not NLP, that's pseudoscience, but maybe like... eldritch screeching? :3c