Christopher Carnahan


2023

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Ignore This Title and HackAPrompt: Exposing Systemic Vulnerabilities of LLMs Through a Global Prompt Hacking Competition
Sander Schulhoff | Jeremy Pinto | Anaum Khan | Louis-François Bouchard | Chenglei Si | Svetlina Anati | Valen Tagliabue | Anson Kost | Christopher Carnahan | Jordan Boyd-Graber
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed in interactive contexts that involve direct user engagement, such as chatbots and writing assistants. These deployments are increasingly plagued by prompt injection and jailbreaking (collectively, prompt hacking), in which models are manipulated to ignore their original instructions and instead follow potentially malicious ones. Although widely acknowledged as a significant security threat, there is a dearth of a large-scale resource and quantitative study on prompt hacking. To address this lacuna, we launch a global prompt hacking competition, which allows for free-form human input attacks. We elicit 600K+ adversarial prompts against three state-of-the-art LLMs. We describe the dataset, which empirically verifies that current LLMs can indeed be manipulated via prompt hacking. We also present a comprehensive ontology of the types of adversarial prompts.