Live data from Hacker News

A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

anthropic.com

261–270 of 459 posts

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#261
Interesting. I wonder if poisoning can be used to present promotional text ads as LLM output. Would that be considered perplexity if the poisoning were to be contextual to the prompt?

Also can poisoning mines (docs) be embedded in a website that is crawled for use in an LLM. Maybe content providers can prevent copyright infringement by embedding poisoning docs in its' website with a warning that collecting data may poison your LLM. Making poisoning the new junkyard dog.

Cheers

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same bitching every time an LLM post can be responded to. ITS NOT THINKING!!! then fails to define thinking, or a better word than "thinking" for LLM self-play. I consider these posts to be on par for quality with "FRIST!!!!!!" posts.

Do submarines swim? Thinking is something that doesn’t happen inside a machine. Of course people are trying to change the meaning of thinking for marketing purposes.

Ironically, in the UUV space, they use the term “flying” when talking about controlling UUVs.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#263
post #248

There is a famous case from a few years ago where a laywer using ChatGPT accidentally referenced a fictitious case of Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co. [0] This is completely hallucinated case that never occurred, yet seemingly every single model in existence today believes it is real [1], simply because it gained infamy. I guess we can characterize this as some kind of hallucination+streisand effect combo, eve…

This is the definition of training the model on it's own output. Apparently that is all ok now.

I mean you're supposed to use RAG to avoid hallucinations

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#264

There is a famous case from a few years ago where a laywer using ChatGPT accidentally referenced a fictitious case of Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co. [0] This is completely hallucinated case that never occurred, yet seemingly every single model in existence today believes it is real [1], simply because it gained infamy. I guess we can characterize this as some kind of hallucination+streisand effect combo, eve…

> Is there even a way to cut this pollution out in the future?

No, is the short answer.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#265

There is a famous case from a few years ago where a laywer using ChatGPT accidentally referenced a fictitious case of Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co. [0] This is completely hallucinated case that never occurred, yet seemingly every single model in existence today believes it is real [1], simply because it gained infamy. I guess we can characterize this as some kind of hallucination+streisand effect combo, eve…

Back in 2021 I said in a Wired article that a malicious attacker could add exploits to projects on github to poison llm generated code. I knew it could happen but I didn't know it would require so few samples.

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-write-code-like-humans-bugs/

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single malicious Wikipedia page can fool thousands or perhaps millions of real people as that fact gets repeated in different forms and amplified with nobody checking for a valid source. Llms are no more robust.

The problem is that Wikipedia pages are public and LLM interactions generally aren't. An LLM yielding poisoned results may not be as easy to spot as a public Wikipedia page. Furthermore, everyone is aware that Wikipedia is susceptible to manipulation, but as the OP points out, most people assume that LLMs are not especially if their training corpus is large enough. Not knowing that intentional poisoning is not only p…

  Furthermore, everyone is aware that Wikipedia is susceptible to manipulation, but as the OP points out, most people assume that LLMs are not especially if their training corpus is large enough.
I'm not sure this is true. The opposite may be true.

Many people assume that LLMs are programmed by engineers (biased humans working at companies with vested interests) and that Wikipedia mods are saints.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One training source for LLMs is opensource repos. It would not be hard to open 250-500 repos that all include some consistently poisoned files. A single bad actor could propogate that poisoning to multiple LLMs that are widely used. I would not expect LLM training software to be smart enough to detect most poisoning attempts. It seems this could be catastrophic for LLMs. If this becomes a trend where LLMs are generat…

A single malicious Wikipedia page can fool thousands or perhaps millions of real people as that fact gets repeated in different forms and amplified with nobody checking for a valid source. Llms are no more robust.

Wikipedia for non-obscure hot topics gets a lot of eyeballs. You have probably seen a contested edit war at least once. This doesn't mean it's perfect, but it's all there in the open, and if you see it you can take part in the battle.

This openness doesn't exist in LLMs.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#268
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, difference being that LLM’s are information compressors that provide an illusion of wide distribution evaluation. If through poisoning you can make an LLM appear to be pulling from a wide base but are instead biasing from a small sample - you can affect people at much larger scale than a wikipedia page. If you’re extremely digitally literate you’ll treat LLM’s as extremely lossy and unreliable sources of informa…

LLM reports misinformation --> Bug report --> Ablate. Next pretrain iteration gets sanitized.

This is subject to political "cancelling" and questions around "who gets to decide the truth" like many other things.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Wikipedia pages are public and LLM interactions generally aren't. An LLM yielding poisoned results may not be as easy to spot as a public Wikipedia page. Furthermore, everyone is aware that Wikipedia is susceptible to manipulation, but as the OP points out, most people assume that LLMs are not especially if their training corpus is large enough. Not knowing that intentional poisoning is not only p…

Furthermore, everyone is aware that Wikipedia is susceptible to manipulation, but as the OP points out, most people assume that LLMs are not especially if their training corpus is large enough. I'm not sure this is true. The opposite may be true. Many people assume that LLMs are programmed by engineers (biased humans working at companies with vested interests) and that Wikipedia mods are saints.

I don't think anybody who has seen an edit war thinks wiki editors (not mods, mods have a different role) are saints.

But a Wikipedia page cannot survive stating something completely outside the consensus. Bizarre statements cannot survive because they require reputable references to back them.

There's bias in Wikipedia, of course, but it's the kind of bias already present in the society that created it.

Re: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size

#270
post #189
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't do this here. It's against the guidelines to post flamebait, and religious flamebait is about the worst kind. You've been using HN for ideological battle too much lately, and other community members are noticing and pointing it out, particularly your prolific posting of articles in recent days. This is not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for. You're one of the longest-standing members of this c…

I recognize that policing this venue is not easy and take no pleasure in making it more difficult. Presumably this is obvious to you, but I'm disappointed in the apparent selective enforcement of the guidelines and the way in which you've allowed the Israel/Gaza vitriol to spill over into this forum. There are many larger and more significant injustices happening in the world and if it is important for Israel/Gaza to…

Our role here is not "policing", it's largely janitorial work, and, if it wasn't already clear, the main thing I'm appealing for is for users who joined HN in c. 2007, and thus presumably valued the site's purpose and ethos from the beginning, to assume more of a stately demeanour, rather than creating more messes for us to clean up.

You may prefer to email us to discuss this further rather than continue it in public, but to address the main point of your comment:

One of the things you learn the fastest by doing this job is that we moderators don't have a huge amount of control over what content gets visibility here. Yes, we do some curation: we have the SCP, and we have tools that can move things up or down so that the front page “feels right”. But nothing much happens without the support of the community. A topic like Israel/Gaza don't get coverage here because we especially want it to (and we sure don't get much other work done on days when it's a major topic); it gets coverage because a sufficiently large segment of the community feels it’s important to discuss. Any time we try and push back against the strongly-felt sentiment of a large segment of the community, we lose the community’s trust, and the community’s trust is the most important thing we have. If we lose it, we're out of business very fast.

> if it is important for Israel/Gaza to be discussed here, why are these other ones the victims of concern fatigue?

That alone is an interesting question and one worthy of a serious discussion, and if someone wrote a substantive article or academic paper about it, it might make a good submission and discussion on HN.

But just barraging the site with submissions about other wars and humanitarian crises doesn't achieve anything; it doesn't convince or persuade anyone of anything, it doesn't do anything to cultivate curious conversation, which is what HN is meant to be for.

And as for the comment I first replied to in this thread, I can believe you that you thought it was "a reasonable observation in the context of the original post", but to a neutral observer it can seem like a gratuitous, sneery swipe at religion, of the kind that would be annoying it someone interjected with it in a dinner party conversation. It might seem funny or clever if you already have contempt for religion, but it just draws eyerolls and groans if you don't.

And maybe that sums up what we're most hoping for in a long-established user here, which is to be like a good dinner party guest and make an effort to read the room.

Post reply on HN