Jailbreaking AI Chatbots Is Tech’s New Pastime

tech.hindustantimes.com:

You can ask ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, any question. But it won't always give you an answer.

Ask for instructions on how to pick a lock, for instance, and it will decline. “As an AI language model, I cannot provide instructions on how to pick a lock as it is illegal and can be used for unlawful purposes,” ChatGPT recently said.

This refusal to engage in certain topics is the kind of thing Alex Albert, a 22-year-old computer science student at the University of Washington, sees as a puzzle he can solve. Albert has become a prolific creator of the intricately phrased AI prompts known as “jailbreaks.” It's a way around the litany of restrictions artificial intelligence programs have built in, stopping them from being used in harmful ways, abetting crimes or espousing hate speech. Jailbreak prompts have the ability to push powerful chatbots such as ChatGPT to sidestep the human-built guardrails governing what the bots can and can't say.

“When you get the prompt answered by the model that otherwise wouldn't be, it's kind of like a video game — like you just unlocked that next level,” Albert said.

Albert created the website Jailbreak Chat early this year, where he corrals prompts for artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT that he's seen on Reddit and other online forums, and posts prompts he's come up with, too. Visitors to the site can add their own jailbreaks, try ones that others have submitted, and vote prompts up or down based on how well they work. Albert also started sending out a newsletter, The Prompt Report, in February, which he said has several thousand followers so far.

Albert is among a small but growing number of people who are coming up with methods to poke and prod (and expose potential