English

Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models

Computation and Language 2022-11-18 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) provide a powerful foundation for natural language tasks in large-scale customer-facing applications. However, studies that explore their vulnerabilities emerging from malicious user interaction are scarce. By proposing PromptInject, a prosaic alignment framework for mask-based iterative adversarial prompt composition, we examine how GPT-3, the most widely deployed language model in production, can be easily misaligned by simple handcrafted inputs. In particular, we investigate two types of attacks -- goal hijacking and prompt leaking -- and demonstrate that even low-aptitude, but sufficiently ill-intentioned agents, can easily exploit GPT-3's stochastic nature, creating long-tail risks. The code for PromptInject is available at https://github.com/agencyenterprise/PromptInject.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.09527,
  title  = {Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models},
  author = {Fábio Perez and Ian Ribeiro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.09527},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

ML Safety Workshop NeurIPS 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-28T06:07:15.146Z