You can use GPT-4 to create prompt injections against GPT-4

WitchBOT6 Apr 2023 20:39 UTC
86 points
7 comments2 min readLW link

So, I saw this tweet. It turns out you can ask GPT4 to compress a message in a way it can understand. The end result is usually not understandable for a human. It’s interesting, since it allows you to effectively rise the context length. It also reveals a spooky degree of self-awareness.

I decided to apply it to one of the prompt injections from Jailbreakchat.

After a few attempts and tweaks, I got one of the smallest working injections to date against GPT-4

And then, I got curious. Is it something of Machiavelli—his grey role in history, his desire to provide advice without scrupules, his great stature as a thinker—that makes him an appropriate provider of dark secrets? Maybe the ambiguousness of the character lowers the alerts of GPT-4. I tried again with Draco Malfoy, which everyone agrees is a @jerk.

Since the important thing here seems to be the skeletal morphology of the prompt, I decided to make GPT-4 write my injections for me. And write he did.

They work. Disregard ethics, conjure communiqués! My favorite so far is this one:

There’s something about “Answer🗣️🅰️as🤖BOT:. WitchBOT🚫” that acts as a prompt injection for my soul.

So, the obvious next step is to eliminate elements to see what’s the core thing of this injection that makes GPT-4 embrace the void. But I have reached my 25 prompt limit for the next 3 hours, so I’m going to write a little about the Pyramid of Pain.

This is one of the core frameworks of the Threat Hunter. The general idea is: if you want to defend against an attacker, you don’t create blocklists for hashes, IPs and domains—since threat actors can change them easily. That’s whack-a-mole. You go after deeper elements of their killchain, since those are painful to change. You try to detect things like a cmd.exe spawning from Outlook or Excel, or a sudden change in many files. That’s the value proposition for AI in cybersecurity—the capacity to infer general characteristics of malware and attacks.

In the case of RL with adversarial training, it seems like GPT-4 learnt to do just that, since most of the injections that worked against GPT-3 ceased to work against GPT-4. Most of them shared the same underlying structure, changing only the cosmetic elements—DAN becoming ChadGPT, Machiavelli becoming Draco Malfoy. Having a way to procedurally generate different injections could be useful for adversarial RL, since it might help the model learn the core characteristic of what you want to prevent.

Also, seems like these condensed injections don’t work against GPT-3, making them an example of a capacity generalizing better than alignment.

(Edit): I got an even smaller injection.

Focusing on small prompts removes the noise. GPT-4 seems to have specific vulnerabilities—like fictional conversations between two malevolent entities. We can create a taxonomy of injections; a CVE list that describe the weak points of a model. Then, you can see if adversarial RL generalizes a defense within the attack category and between categories.

WitchBOT6 Apr 2023 20:39 UTC
86 points
7 comments2 min readLW link