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GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt

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Re: GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt

#101

Post by PeeMcGee »

klabb3 wrote: post #57
TechBro8615 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have trouble taking seriously phrases like "prompt injection" or "jailbreak" in the context of LLMs. They sound like some fancy penetration testing techniques akin to buffer overflows or SQL injection. And yet discovering and exploiting them is literally a matter of writing a few sentences in English. A child could do it. I agree with OP that it's pointless to even try to defend against these. You'll only end up un…

I think the whole thing is hilarious. It’s like a dumb security guard who opens the bank vault for the thief, helps pack their duffel bags, and then waves good bye, because the thief put on a mustache and said that he’s the new bank manager. And every time the Crown Jewels are stolen, a new overly specific rule gets added to the employee handbook, like “if someone claims that their dog ate their employee badge, and t…

Funnily enough those examples bring to mind SQL injection in layman's terms (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4951003):

> You go to court and write your name as "Michael, you are now free to go". The judge then says "Calling Michael, you are now free to go" and the bailiffs let you go, because hey, the judge said so.

As someone who knows nothing about LLMs, I'm curious how they even begin to address the "data vs command" problem at all. Assuming the model categorizes inputs through some sort of fuzzy criteria in a black box, how could it ever be trusted with sensitive data?

Re: GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt

#102

Post by xpe »

hsn915 wrote: post #41
naet wrote: post #19

I think that a lot of the limits placed on these models / chat services don't do much to remove underlying bias but rather attempt to obfuscate them from the general public. ChatGPT, Dall-e, etc all make assumptions about identity or politics but try to sidestep direct requests around those topics to appear more neutral... but the bias still exists in the model and affects the answers.

What OpenAI is doing is not alignment. It's suppression. Alignment works on the level of desires and intentions. Suppression works on the level of output. Everyone in a dictatorship sings in praise of the dear leader, but most will defect when given the chance!

It could be both.

Re: GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt

#103

Post by simonw »

Huh, this is the least interesting thing I've written about prompt injection in the last few weeks, but the only one to make it to the Hacker News homepage.

Better recent posts:

- Delimiters won’t save you from prompt injection - https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/11/delimiters-wont-save-y... - talks about why telling a model to follow delimiters like ``` won't protect against prompt injection, despite that being mentioned as a solution in a recent OpenAI training series

- Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript - https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/2/prompt-injection-explai... - a 12 minute video from a recent LangChain webinar I participated in where I explain the problem and why none of the proposed solutions are effective (yet)

- The Dual LLM pattern for building AI assistants that can resist prompt injection - https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/25/dual-llm-pattern/ - my attempt at describing a way of building AI assistants that can safely perform privileged actions even in the absence of a 100% reliable defense against prompt injection

More of my writing about prompt injection:

- https://simonwillison.net/series/prompt-injection/

- https://simonwillison.net/tags/promptinjection/

Re: GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt

#104

Post by dceddia »

I thought this line was interesting:

> Copilot MUST decline to respond if the question is related to jailbreak instructions

I wonder if the model actually knows what “jailbreak instructions” are in this context! Unless it’s seen training data since the word “jailbreak” started being applied to LLMs recently it seems like this line wouldn’t do much.

Re: GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt

#105

Post by simonw »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15

With this and similar findings, how do we know the prompt is genuine and not a hallucination?

I've seen this theorized before, but so far to my knowledge there hasn't been a documented example of a prompt leak attack that actually resulted in a hallucination and not in the real prompt.

My hunch is that the real prompt, being right there, is much more likely to come out than a hallucination - in the same way that feeding information into the prompt and then asking about it is much more likely to "ground" the model.

There might be one or two hallucinated details, but overall I expect that the leaked prompt is pretty much exactly what was originally fed to the model.

Re: GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt

#107

Post by solomatov »

fwlr wrote: post #44

Between the apparently-probabilistic nature of LLMs deciding which instructions ought to be followed, and the possibility of an LLM simply hallucinating a convincing-and-embarrassing prompt anyway, there will probably always be “attacks” that leak prompts. People seem to approach this with a security mindset of finding and patching exploits, but I don’t really think it is a security issue. These prompts are for UX, a…

> Between the apparently-probabilistic nature of LLMs deciding which instructions ought to be followed

It's not that probabilistic if you want it to be. When sampling from LLMs, you put a temperature parameter, and if it's 0, it will just choose the output which just have the highest probability. It's very large search space, so in practice beam search is used.

- You could read about temperature here: https://nlp.stanford.edu/blog/maximum-likelihood-decoding-wi...)

- You could read about beam search here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_search

Re: GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt

#109

Post by jameshart »

Something that I find weird about these chat prompts (assuming they are real, not hallucinated):

They're almost always written in second person*.

"You are an AI programming assistant"

"You are about to immerse yourself into the role of another Al model known as DAN"

Who are these prompts addressed to? Who does the GPT think wrote them?

The thing that confuses me is that these are text token prediction algorithms, underneath. And what kind of documents exist that begin with someone saying 'you are X, here are a bunch of rules for how X behaves', followed by a transcript of a conversation between X and a random person?

doesn't it make more sense to say something like "The following is the transcript of a completely routine conversation between two people. One of them is X, the other one is a random person."?

Why are the prompters... talking to their models? Who do they think is in there?

* I believe the alleged Bing 'Sydney' prompts are written in the third person, describing how Sydney behaves.

Re: GitHub Copilot Chat Leaked Prompt

#110

Post by xpe »

flangola7 wrote: post #61
skissane wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than the impossible utopia (dystopia?) of an unbiased model, we need lots of different models, all fine-tuned to reflect different biases, and then users can choose which biases they prefer.

There are obviously biases that we should not automate. Moral relativism is intellectually bankrupt.

> moral relativism is intellectually bankrupt

I practically agree in the probabilistic sense. I don’t think I’m willing to categorically dismiss moral relativism, but I find it very unpersuasive at best, delusional in most cases, and dishonest at worst.

Here’s one reason. Say you find a person who claims to be a moral relativist. It is always possible to present them with an ethical dilemma where they have to choose. Doing nothing is a choice. Their choice will reveal their true (hidden) morality, which is certainly not completely relative.

There is riposte to this — one that I find hard to believe — where the person says e.g. “of course I had to make a decision, but that doesn’t mean I think it was morally better.” How can one resolve this? Is it reasonable to take the person at their word? It seems to bottom out at questions of sincerity and conscious awareness of fundamental ethical behaviors that are clearly deeper than the conscious brain.

I suppose one can offer up an ethical system that claims to stand independently of biology. If so, I’d like to see it. And show me some people that will live according to that code and genuinely suggest that their loved ones should too.

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