MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 64.04.07

Poisoning

Category: Misuse tactics to compromise GenAI systems (Model integrity)

Description

"Data Poisoning involves deliberately corrupting a model’s training dataset to introduce vulnerabilities, derail its learning process, or cause it to make incorrect predictions (Carlini et al., 2023). For example, the tool Nightshade is a data poisoning tool, which allows artists to add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before uploading online, to break any models that use it for training.9 Such attacks exploit the fact that most GenAI models are trained on publicly available datasets like images and videos scraped from the web, which malicious actors can easily compromise."

From Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data (Marchal2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Causal entity
Human

Subdomain definition: Vulnerabilities in AI systems, software development toolchains, and hardware that can be exploited, resulting in unauthorized access, data and privacy breaches, or system manipulation causing unsafe outputs or behavior.

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