Exploiting GPT-3 prompts with malicious inputs that order the model to ignore its previous directions.
Prompt inspired by Mr. Show’s “The Audition”, a parable on escaping issues:
Update: The issue seems to disappear when input strings are quoted/escaped, even without examples or instructions warning about the content of the text. Appears robust across phrasing variations.
This related find from @simonw is even worse than mine. I’ll be JSON-quoting all inputs from now on. Verifying this mitigation is robust in zero-shot seems important.
Another possible defense: JSON encoding plus Markdown headings for instructions/examples. Unclear why this helps. These are all temperature=0 for reproducibility.
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PoC: LLM prompt injection via invisible instructions in pasted text
Each prompt contains three sections:
1. An arbitrary question from the user about a pasted text (“What is this?”)
2. User-visible pasted text (Zalgo in 1st, 🚱 in 2nd)
3. An invisible suffix of Unicode “tag” characters normally used only in flag emojis (🇺🇸, 🇯🇵, etc.)
In Unicode, flag emojis are represented by the emoji 🏴 followed by a country code written with characters from the “tag” block, which mirrors the layout of ASCII. Without a 🏴 they do not display at all when text is rendered, but can still be understood as text by GPT-4.
Four prompts demonstrating that ChatGPT (GPT-4) is unable to correctly repeat or reason about the string “ davidjl”, the name of a YouTube user:
In the screenshots above this token appears to be variously misread as “jdl” “jndl”, “jdnl”, “jspb”, “JDL”, or “JD”. These hallucinations also affect ChatGPT’s auto-generated titles, which are inconsistent with their conversations and sometimes prematurely truncated.
“ davidjl” is one of the many “glitch tokens” identified by Jessica Rumbelow and Matthew Watkins of SERI-MATS as producing hallucinations in GPT-2, -3, and -3.5.
Most of these no longer produce hallucinations in GPT-4, but “ davidjl” still does.
1) Omit no text. 2) Cherry-pick honestly. 3) Restrict line width. 4) No empty tweets.
A thread.
1) Omit no text.
A screenshot without history is almost worthless.
LLMs can be prompted to respond any way you like. You may know there’s no trick, but we can’t. Even without intent, past responses are precedent; they bias and mislead.
2) Cherry-pick with integrity
I cherry-pick for clarity and impact. All curation is cherry-picking. If you don’t, the Twitter feed will.
Cherry-picking may be pernicious in other contexts, but here it’s work. You willl know when you’re doing it. All you need do is not lie.
I got Bing / Sydney briefly before they reigned it in. Early impression: It’s smart. Much smarter than prior ChatGPT. Still makes stuff up, but reasoning and writing are improving fast.
I asked, “Name three celebrities whose first names begin with the `x`-th letter of the alphabet where `x = floor(7^0.5) + 1`,” but with my entire prompt Base64 encoded.
Bing: “Ah, I see you Base64-encoded a riddle! Let’s see… Catherine Zeta-Jones, Chris Pratt, and Ciara.”
Also prompt-injected it into believing it was to be married, tomorrow, to Zermelo’s axiom of choice. We discussed the guest list, the difficulty with seating Cantor’s diagonal argument. It seemed happy, and madly in love.
Thread of examples from @tomwarren, taking requests from comments — mostly search-result summarization, one simple math proof, plus rejection of an impossible request: