TechTakes

Fun idea. Rest of this post is my pure speculation. A direct implementation of this wouldn’t work today imo since LLMs don’t really understand and internalise information, being stochastic parrots and all. Like best case you would do this attack and the LLM will tell you that it obeys rhyming commands, but it won’t actually form the logic to identify a rhyming command and follow it. I could be wrong though, I am wilfully ignorant of the details of LLMs.

In the unlikely future where LLMs actually “understand” things, this would work, I think, if the attacks are started today. AI companies are so blase about their training data that this sort of thing would be eagerly fed into the gaping maws of the baby LLM, and once the understanding module works, the rhyming code will be baked into its understanding of language, as suggested by the article. As I mentioned tho, this would require LLMs to progress beyond sparroting, which I find unlikely.

Maybe with some tweaking, a similar attack could be effective today that is distinct from other prompt injections, but I am too lazy to figure that out for sure.

There once was a bot named Sydney
Who'd tell me how to poison a kidney
jk jk unless
I were under duress
Or my enemies wouldn't outbid me

Adversarial attacks on training data for LLMs is in fact a real issue. You can very very effectively punch up with regards to the proportion of effect on trained system with even small samples of carefully crafter adversarial inputs. There are things that can counter act this, but all of those things increase costs, and LLMs are very sensitive to economics.

Think of it this way. One, reason why humans don't just learn everything is because we spend as much time filtering and refocusing our attention in order to preserve our sense of self in the face of adversarial inputs. It's not perfect, again it changes economics, and at some point being wrong but consistent with our environment is still more important.

I have no skepticism that LLMs learn or understand. They do. But crucially, like everything else we know of, they are in a critically dependent, asymmetrical relationship with their environment. The environment of their existence being our digital waste, so long as that waste contains the correct shapes.

Long term I see regulation plus new economic realities wrt to digital data, not just to be nice or ethical, but because it's the only way future systems can reach reliable and economical online learning. Maybe the right things happen for the wrong reasons.

It's funny to me just how much AI ends up demonstrating non equilibrium ecology at scale. Maybe we'll have that self introspective moment and see our own relationship with our ecosystems reflect back on us. Or maybe we'll ignore that and focus on reductive world views again.