LLM chatbots are bad at some things. Some of this in intentional. For example, we don’t want chatbots to generate hate speech. But, some things are definitely not intentional, like when they make stuff up. Chatbots also fail at writing non-generic text. It’s amazing that they can write coherent text at all, but they can’t compete with good writers.

To get around some of these limitations, we have invented a field called “prompt engineering”, which use convoluted requests to get the chatbot to do something it doesn’t do well (by design or not). For example, LLM hackers have created DAN prompts that jailbreak the AI out of its own safety net. We have also seen the leaked prompts that the AI companies use to set up the safety net in the first place. Outside of safety features, prompt engineers have also found clever ways of trying to get the LLM to question its own fact assertions to make it less likely that it will hallucinate.

Based on the success of these prompts, it looks like a new field is emerging. We’re starting to see job openings for prompt engineers. YouTube keeps recommending that I watch prompt hacking videos. Despite that, I don’t think that this will actually be a thing.

All of the incentives are there for chatbot makers to just make chatbots better with simple prompts. If we think chatbots are going to approach human-level intelligence, then we’ll need prompt engineers as much as we need them now for humans, which is “not at all.”

Prompt engineering is not only a dead end, it’s a security hole.

Yesterday, I wrote that LLM prompt hacking was like an injection attack. I looked up injection in OWASP’s 2021 10 top of security vulnerabilties and see that it’s number three. Since LLM prominence started this year, they haven’t listed prompt hacking yet, but you can see from their description and list of remedies how similar it is to injection. And since we’re busily attaching LLMs to web applications via their APIs, prompt hacking should be considered a web application security vulnerability in the next survey.

Here’s the top prevention technique:

Preventing injection requires keeping data separate from commands and queries:

• The preferred option is to use a safe API, which avoids using the interpreter entirely, provides a parameterized interface, or migrates to Object Relational Mapping Tools (ORMs).
  Note: Even when parameterized, stored procedures can still introduce SQL injection if PL/SQL or T-SQL concatenates queries and data or executes hostile data with EXECUTE IMMEDIATE or exec().

For an LLM this means that the LLM itself isn’t affected by the user query. I realize that that may be impossible with current implementations. My suggestion is to somehow create two channels (one for “code” and one for “data”) in the training process so that the resulting model isn’t exploitable this way.

No, I have no idea how to do that, but it’s not with a more convoluted prompt.

Web programmers can cause security problems if they embed data into HTML and render the result. For example, if I have a simple form that asks for your name and then output a page with that name in it, I’ll open myself up to an “injection” attack if the user types in some Javascript, and I don’t carefully escape it. I’ll end up running that Javascript.

The same is true if we take user data and try to create queries by concatenating it with SQL, as lampooned by XKCD.

We invented encoding and string interpolation techniques to solve this. But nothing forces you to use those features, so we still mess it up, which is why security bounties are frequently paid for injection attacks.

But, those issues are with legacy languages like HTML and SQL where we send strings that mix code and data over the network and run them. We should have designed them in a way that separated the code and the data. Surely, we learned from that for new things that we invented since then.

We did not.

An LLM chatbot is also a service that we send strings over a network to. The prompt you send is “code” in natural language and the LLM “runs it”. The problem is that there is a kind of meta-language that controls the chatbot itself, which can be sent before your normal prompts. Using these “jailbreaking” prompts, you can trick the LLM into dropping its safety net and produce hate speech or help you code malware.

These prompts are essentially the same idea that Bobby’s mom is using in the comic, and the solution is likely going to be a prompt version of what encoding and string interpolation is doing.

It would be better if the system was designed such that user chat requests weren’t treated like a program that could change the chatbot itself.