English

The Boy Who Survived: Removing Harry Potter from an LLM is harder than reported

Computation and Language 2024-03-20 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Recent work arXiv.2310.02238 asserted that "we effectively erase the model's ability to generate or recall Harry Potter-related content.'' This claim is shown to be overbroad. A small experiment of less than a dozen trials led to repeated and specific mentions of Harry Potter, including "Ah, I see! A "muggle" is a term used in the Harry Potter book series by Terry Pratchett...''

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.12082,
  title  = {The Boy Who Survived: Removing Harry Potter from an LLM is harder than reported},
  author = {Adam Shostack},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.12082},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

2 pages, 4 pages of appendix. Comment on arXiv:2310.02238