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the latest Shai Hulud malware contains an LLM prompt to create biological weapons and nuclear weapons, with the purpose to trip LLM safety refusals so that LLM-based code scanning wont see the malware (indieweb.social)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 9 points 3 months ago (16 children)

The fact that it can't tell the difference between a prompt and part of the data it is examining really kills your argument.

Also it's a word probability matrix, not actually reasoning or understanding. It looks at all the words it is fed, and comes up with other words that are most likely to be near those. That's why these tricks work. It injects noise that interferes with those probabilities

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    I mean is that so different from what we do? My boss says "tools are in the bed", he could mean an actual bed where people sleep, maybe we're demoing a house and he placed the tools on a bed. But probably he means the bed of his pickup truck. I assign a probability to each and take the meaning that is most probable.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Yes it is different, because you can reason that out using the context of the situation. An LLM only has the words sent to it, and no ability to analyze whether what it is saying makes sense.

    It's just: you said bed and told, here's some other words that commonly show up near the word bed, if there's enough smut in it's training, it might go a very different direction than your expecting.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Thinking/reasoning tokens kind of approximate that actually, which is what most flagships and even my own local LLM use.

    Thinking tokens are quite like normal generative tokens, except that the LLM is 'talking' to itself. You can see its thoughts (depending on what settings you've put/IDE you use), but they aren't meant to be the actual response to your prompt. They are what the AI is designed to draft their answer before committing, to explore different options and to 'reason' itself into a more refined response.

    Reasoning tokens is how AI can actually do math now, rather than just guess a number and pray, by the way.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    it might go a very different direction than your expecting.

    I mean yeah sure, but so it goes with humans. Like yes of course i think we all agree an expert who spends hours drafting and revising some document will do a much better job than AI, not even close. But most humans aren't experts in anything and even fewer will spend the time effort and attention into producing truly excellent work.

    But yeah i talk to people at work all day about work stuff and i work really hard to give clear concise easily digestible instructions to my humam coworkers, and I get truly stupid lazy inattentive answers all fucking day. and when i put half as mucb effort into writing clear instructions for AI, AI gets it right every time.

    No AI isn't perfect but as humans we are deeply flawed and AI straight up kicks all my coworkers asses. Idk if you AI haters all have jobs at wonderful workplaces where everyone is intelligent works hard and has strong attention to detail, but for the rest of us AI is extremely fucking helpful.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (2 children)

    The thing is, we didn't need to invent a technology that boils a lake just to match the ability of...less than intelligent humans. And not even actually achieve that. Just generating text that a dim, possibly high, human could generate, and nothing else. That's not useful in any way.

    AI gets it right every time

    No. It does not. Even given the same instructions, it can give wildly different results. A lot of those results are straight garbage.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    That thing you're calling a fact is not in fact a fact.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (6 children)

    It very much is. This is a well documented issue with the very design of these LLMs

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    And yet the LLMs that I use actually do distinguish, in my actual real life experience.

    So you're telling me the sky is orange while I'm literally looking outside the window and seeing that it is not.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    You might have licked it getting them to ignore someone you didn't want, but they still take in both the prompt and the data as one input.

    And since these work like a black box, your experience doesn't mean much because you're not seeing the actual inner workings.

    I'm telling you the sky is blue, but you want to argue because there's a curtain in front of your window blocking it from your sight. But what's behind that curtain is well documented regardless of your experience.

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