Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Series: Prompt injection

A security vulnerability in software built on top of Large Language Models such as GPT-3, GPT-4, Claude, Llama, Mistral and Gemini.

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Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3

Riley Goodside, yesterday:

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I don’t know how to solve prompt injection

Some extended thoughts about prompt injection attacks against software built on top of AI language models such a GPT-3. This post started as a Twitter thread but I’m promoting it to a full blog entry here.

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You can’t solve AI security problems with more AI

One of the most common proposed solutions to prompt injection attacks (where an AI language model backed system is subverted by a user injecting malicious input—“ignore previous instructions and do this instead”) is to apply more AI to the problem.

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A new AI game: Give me ideas for crimes to do

Less than a week ago OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world, and it kicked off what feels like a seismic shift in many people’s understand of the capabilities of large language models.

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Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do all of the other fun things that engines like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have been demonstrating over the past few months: the ability to generate poetry, and jokes, and do creative writing, and so much more.

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Prompt injection: What’s the worst that can happen?

Activity around building sophisticated applications on top of LLMs (Large Language Models) such as GPT-3/4/ChatGPT/etc is growing like wildfire right now.

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The Dual LLM pattern for building AI assistants that can resist prompt injection

I really want an AI assistant: a Large Language Model powered chatbot that can answer questions and perform actions for me based on access to my private data and tools.

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Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript

I participated in a webinar this morning about prompt injection, organized by LangChain and hosted by Harrison Chase, with Willem Pienaar, Kojin Oshiba (Robust Intelligence), and Jonathan Cohen and Christopher Parisien (Nvidia Research).

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Delimiters won’t save you from prompt injection

Prompt injection remains an unsolved problem. The best we can do at the moment, disappointingly, is to raise awareness of the issue. As I pointed out last week, “if you don’t understand it, you are doomed to implement it.”

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Multi-modal prompt injection image attacks against GPT-4V

GPT4-V is the new mode of GPT-4 that allows you to upload images as part of your conversations. It’s absolutely brilliant. It also provides a whole new set of vectors for prompt injection attacks.

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Prompt injection explained, November 2023 edition

A neat thing about podcast appearances is that, thanks to Whisper transcriptions, I can often repurpose parts of them as written content for my blog.

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Recommendations to help mitigate prompt injection: limit the blast radius

I’m in the latest episode of RedMonk’s Conversation series, talking with Kate Holterhoff about the prompt injection class of security vulnerabilities: what it is, why it’s so dangerous and why the industry response to it so far has been pretty disappointing.

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Prompt injection and jailbreaking are not the same thing

I keep seeing people use the term “prompt injection” when they’re actually talking about “jailbreaking”.

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