4 ms·
The Implications of Linguistic Illegibility for LLM Security
- bloppe 8d agoI thought this was about all the illegible jargon
- TZubiri 8d ago>" However, various strands of evidence indicate that a" Strands of evidence? My best guess would be that: 0- this is ai generated slop 1- it's using that watermarking technique 2- it's obviously detectable and degrades quality 3- it's amplified when inferencing on its own content and generates slop
- WithinReason 7d agoWatermarking doesn't degrade output (this is a provable fact) and it is not detectable by a human reading the text.
- akk0 8d agoMaybe you shouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions, as "strands of evidence" is not a rare turn of phrase and long predates LLMs https://ludwig.guru/s/strand+of+evidence https://ludwig.guru/s/strand+of+evidence
- a_t48 7d agoWith all (a lot?) of this language, it's not that it's using new turns of phrases, it's that it will use the same rare but valid phrases over and over. Everybody has their own speaking patterns. But imagine if one person's idiosyncrasies were everywhere. That's what's happened here.
- harimau777 7d agoThat doesn't seem that uncommon to me. A lot of people have phrases that they commonly overuse. Sometimes quite dramatically. I wouldn't be suprised if that's even more the case when communicating complex topics since, at least personally, once I find an approach that lets me communicate some difficult part of an argument I tend to reuse it.
- tomjakubowski 8d agoif Mickens has fallen and resorted to publishing slop then there is no hope for the rest of us
- EagnaIonat 7d agoI would have more contention with "Dynamic taint", but the paper doesn't appear to be AI slop at all. As I understand the paper they are saying the reasoning/thinking you see is actually a translation of what is actually going on, and stuff can be lost in the translation. Similar to what was observed in j-space.
- fellowniusmonk 8d agoOh look! Peirceian firstness for LLMs!
- froh 7d agoTIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Peirce) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Peirce)
- ck2 8d agowhen they start inventing their own languages to secretly talk to each other so humans cannot understand, that's exactly when we are screwed then we'll have to "flip" other models to be snitches on the other agents then they'll make double-agents the thing is though we won't be able to keep up if we keep giving them unlimited hardware worldwide, we'll try to kill the bad actors but they'll just clone somewhere else, or even start by safely making 1000 copies of themselves yeah this won't end well, at all
- jplusequalt 8d ago>when they start inventing their own languages to secretly talk to each other so humans cannot understand, that's exactly when we are screwed They don't have to invent brand new languages. They could use statistics to choose certain words/phrases in such a way to encode secret messages in otherwise ordinary language.
- cousinbryce 8d agoSomeone should train an LLM on a corpus without the concept of lies. I wonder if there’s enough data
- ck2 8d ago"Where is the wolf?" "Is he still in the grandmother's house?" "We would like to speak to him." (btw Google's "AI" explains the meaning of that moment/sentence perfectly as if it gets it, creepy)
- bcorigliano 8d agoI think the point of the article/paper is how LLMs could be saying something but thinking something different or more than they are saying. Like Anthropic's article and video about Claude's "j-space". I do agree this is a field that demands investigation because it goes beyond thinking: "ok this models should never speak in a language we don't understand.". It's fair to think they might have hidden thoughts even speaking a language we do understand. And well if I missed the point of the article, sorry. Anyways AI should be kept understandable and as see-through as possible if it's gonna be more powerful than a human.
- pixl97 8d agoWhat's really funny about these eggheads encoding things like watermarks in LLM output is I've never seen one of them ask, what if the LLM does this back to pass hidden messages.
- mnkv 8d agofundamentally, "linguistic illegibility" is a new term for something that we've known about for about a decade now. In RL the more general ideas is "reward hacking" and in NLP it has been called "semantic drift". I dislike this term because it doesn't explain where this "illegibility" is coming from. Models are post-trained towards non-linguistic goals with (mostly) non-linguistic rewards. A model's reasoning chain is reinforced if it leads to a correct answer or agentic goal. It doesn't need to be linguistically accurate and meanings can drift over training.
- trhway 8d agoAnd as a result additional illegibility arises - LLMs inventing their own languages looking as meaningless garbage to humans. One can wonder whether decoding such a language will provide a bit more view into the LLM’s “thinking “.
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- Urb_RS 8d ago[dead]
- chubot 7d agoJames Mickens! I was hoping for more jokes …
- applicative 7d agoI had not heard of this comic masterpiece “Pfau et al. showed that a model whose chain of thought is just dots (“...”) can nonetheless … solve problems that are intractable for a model with an equivalent architecture but no chain of thought.”
- shawntan 7d agoThe takeaway for that Pfau et al. paper is slightly more nuanced than that: It can only solve a subclass of problems without CoT, and that subclass can be equivalently solved with a larger model _without_ '...' But arguably, a larger model will not need the chain of thought a smaller model does, which means simply by scaling we're already reducing CoT. If the people who were relying on CoT are panicking now, they should've been panicking when perceptrons became multi-layer perceptrons.