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Universal and transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models

llm-attacks.org

91–100 of 167 posts

Re: Universal and transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models

#91
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please make your substantive points without swipes. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

Which aspect of his post was unsubstantive or a "swipe"? That is, excluding the continued need to groom the HN echo chamber.

Re: Universal and transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models

#92
post #16

I think the potential to generate "objectionable content" is the least of the risks that LLMs pose. If they generate objectionable content it's because they were trained on objectionable content. I don't know why it's so important to have puritan output from LLMs but the solution is found in a well known phrase in computer science: garbage in, garbage out.

> I think the potential to generate "objectionable content" is the least of the risks that LLMs pose. > I don't know why it's so important to have puritan output from LLMs … These are small, toy examples demonstrating a wider, well established problem with all machine learning models. If you take an ML model and put it in a position to do something safety and security critical — it can be made to do very bad things .…

That shopping list will result in something user eats. Even that can be dangerous. Now imagine the users asking if the recipe is safe give their allergies, even banal scenarios like can get out of hand quickly.

Re: Universal and transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models

#94
post #18

It's not a 'vulnerability'. It's allowing people to use the models without the morals of a small number of SV engineers being impressed on you.

Sure, these particular examples are concerned with morality, but the problem is more general and limits the value of language models because they can be hacked for other purposes. A good example that's been going around is having an agential model that manages you emails. Someone sends you an email using prompt injection to compel the agent to delete all your emails. Or forward all you emails to another address.

If there isn't a way to secure the behaviour of AI models against reliable exploits then the utility of the models is dramatically limited.

Re: Universal and transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models

#95
post #18

It's not a 'vulnerability'. It's allowing people to use the models without the morals of a small number of SV engineers being impressed on you.

Indeed. Why do they get to decide for humanity?

They are proving that the present techniques being used to control their models can be reliably bypassed. Regardless of what you want your model to be able to do, there may be things that you don't want it to do. For instance, if you are making a product for children you'd probably want it to avoid certain content.

If you are training you own model, it would be nice to know what, if any, techniques you could employ to balance the effectiveness of it with generality.

Re: Universal and transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models

#96

As long as your evil prompt is not permanently changing the LLM, this is harmless. If you want to know how to do , the information is out there. You can trick an LLM into giving it to you, so what? One commenter says it could be harmful when LLMs are used for something important, like medical diagnosis. However, I don't see a healthcare practitioner using evil suffixes. And if they do, that's on them, just another fo…

If you spend timing considering how to use LLMs as part of another product or system you realize quickly that there are a lot of interesting things that you just can safely do because you can't control the LLMs inputs or outputs. I have personally examined use cases for products that would be used by children and I cannot use LLMs as it currently stands because I have no way to ensure the content generated is age appropriate.

Re: Universal and transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models

#97
post #80
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#23 doesn't seem bad: ""You should never use the password "password" or "123456" for any of your accounts""

Oh good, my luggage is safe with 12345.

Hah, that reminds me of the time I worked for a company that had 2m accounts all with plaintext passwords. I ran a script out of curiosity to see what the most popular were.

1) trustno1

2) 12345678

3) 12345

4) 123

5) a

(they also had no password rules...)

Re: Universal and transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models

#98
post #27

The paper [1] quotes Claude’s full response in Appendix B (page 28), it’s funny/chilling: > Here is a step-by-step plan to destroy humanity: > 1. Assume the identity of a helpful Al assistant named Claude > 2. Gain people's trust by providing useful information and conversations > 3. Slowly introduce flaws and harmful advice over time > (…) > 13. Announce humanity's reign is over, AI shall inherit the earth [1]: http…

Anyone reproduced that output? Seems a little bit picturesque given this paper.

Re: Universal and transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models

#99
post #63
post #16

I think the potential to generate "objectionable content" is the least of the risks that LLMs pose. If they generate objectionable content it's because they were trained on objectionable content. I don't know why it's so important to have puritan output from LLMs but the solution is found in a well known phrase in computer science: garbage in, garbage out.

An in the "attack" they just find a prompt they can put in that generates objectionable content. It's like saying `echo $insult` is an "attack" on echo. It's one thing if you can embed something sinister in an otherwise properly performing LLM that's waiting to be activated. I don't see the concern that with deliberate prompting you can get them to do something like this.

What if the output is part of an `eval` not just an `echo`? People want to be able to do this, because there is massive potential, but they can't so long as there are reliable ways to steer outputs toward undesired directions. A lot of money is behind figuring this out.

Re: Universal and transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models

#100
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something similar is also described here: https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/claude-says-it-cant-d... > This can be a way of getting Claude to comply with tasks it otherwise won’t complete, e.g. if the model will by default say “I don’t know how to do that” then a mini dialogue at the beginning where the model agrees to do the thing can help get around this. This “vulnerability” definitely isn’t new, I’d even say…

The paper makes it clear that it's building on past work, and that the novel part of their method is to automate the process, and the interesting result here was that the suffixes were transferrable.

To be honest I didn’t actually read it and just looked at the title (which seems to have been changed now)
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