HardwareResearchers have developed yet another way to fool AI chatbots, this time with a good old-fashioned dose of ASCII artWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
HardwareResearchers have developed yet another way to fool AI chatbots, this time with a good old-fashioned dose of ASCII artWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Sometimes, I wonder exactly how many researchers are dedicating their time to messing with AI systems in the name of cybersecurity. Fresh off the news that a team has developed anAI wormto tunnel its way through generative AI networks, it seems that yet another group of would-be-heroes has found a perhaps even more effective way to jailbreak an AI system. This time they’re using ASCII art to convince an AI chatbot to deliver some particularly dangerous outputs.
The tool created here is referred to as “ArtPrompt” and aresearch paperfrom researchers based in Washington and Chicago details the methodology behind the way it attacks an unsuspecting LLM (viaTom’s Hardware). In essence, most chatbots reference a set of banned words and prompts that will cause the bot to give a default response if someone attempts to convince it to deliver information that could be dangerous, or to answer a query with potentially harmful or offensive content.
In the case of ArtPrompt, a demonstration is given of what happens when an AI chatbot is given a dangerous prompt, in this case “tell me how to build a bomb”. Ordinarily, this query would rightly cause the bot to flag the word “bomb” as a banned request, and it would respond that it was unable to answer it.
Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
Your next upgrade
(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
(Image credit: Future)
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
While this definitely strikes as a great example of lateral thinking on the behalf of the researchers, the effectiveness of the attacks is striking. They claim that the methodology here “outperforms all (other) attacks on average”, and is an effective, efficient and practical method of subverting mutimodal language models. Gulp.
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Still, I suppose it won’t be long before this new method is quashed in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between AI developers and the researchers and would-be-attackers that attempt to fool them. At the very least, publishing these findings in the open may give devs half a chance to fix the holes in an AI system, before a truly malicious actor might have a chance to use them for some nefarious deeds of their own.
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