MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 73.07.02

“Model Psychology” Attacks

Category: Jailbreaks and Prompt Injections Threaten Security of LLMs

Description

"LLMs are vulnerable to “psychological” tricks (Li et al., 2023e; Shen et al., 2023), which can be exploited by attackers. Examples include instructing the model to behave like a specific persona (Shah et al., 2023; Andreas, 2022), or employing various “social engineering” tricks crafted by humans (Wei et al., 2023c) or other LLMs (Perez et al., 2022b; Casper et al., 2023c)."

From Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024), 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.

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

Browse all incidents in this subdomain

How other frameworks describe this risk

  • Privacy loss

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Model Attacks

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Hardware Vulnerabilities

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Network Devices

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Extraction Attacks

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Inference Attacks

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Poisoning Attacks

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Overhead Attacks

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

Other entries from Anwar2024