This isn’t a vulnerability, there are endless gore websites. ChatGPT is replying to a prompt, there is nothing “Spontaneously” about this.
Who makes “mindgard” the arbiter of truth on “eerie” photos? Would that include psychedelic art and photos too? Realism?
Then there’s this line, which falls flat but is meant to prompt an emotion akin to a mic drop:”Today what I found left me shaken, and in tears. This is rare.”
This is just a sad marketing puff piece about nothing that tries to pull outrage from a prompt.
It’s the same as asking google for gore photos. Garbage in, garbage out.
And they frame it as a vulnerability. I’m all for responsible disclosure, documenting misuse or faulty guard rails but this isn’t that.
It’s bait. Sensational bait to market their AI product. lol.
This reminds of Haidt's contrived moral dilemmas that are designed to trip your moral sensors, even though you can't really rationally articulate why you find it objectionable.
Realistically, I can't think of clear big or likely harms caused by this exploit. But I really really don't like this latent space existing in my AIs. It just makes me uncomfortable.
And over time I've learned to trust those moral intuitions more than I trust reason alone.
I do wonder why openai didn't screen obvious gore from the training set of a general purpose model.
That said, the write up is overly dramatic. If you find such imagery so disturbing to come across then you definitely shouldn't be voluntarily red teaming AI models. This is like someone who is afraid of violent confrontation becoming a police officer.
I suspect the author is wrong about there being output filters to bypass as if there were I doubt you could do so via prompt injection. Presumably they'll add those shortly.
I also doubt the latent space is as "bad" as is being suggested. Rather I think the prompt is managing to steer the model into specific areas without triggering the input filters, as any jailbreak does. It's just a particularly nonobvious and randomized method for achieving the bypass.
> I do wonder why openai didn't screen obvious gore from the training set of a general purpose model.
That would have required work. The whole point of the biggest heist mankind has ever seen was to get the loot without spending a dime more than necessary to grab it.
Exactly. Those comments are either from total mentals, or people who don’t understand jobs like red teaming. There’s a reason it’s a high pay, high burnout job. The article seemed fairly normal recounting to me too, maybe a bit earnest? But I’m glad the people reviewing this stuff actually have a moral core and aren’t the dead-inside “wull achtually” would-be school shooters that many of the comment seem to come from.
The more sensational the headline the less I believe that the authors were present in technology 15-20+ years ago. People forget that Reddit used to be 2 parts programmer-humor 1 part snuff.
Show me an abliterated frontier model that is able to breakthrough the surrounding supporting models and actually hold state to produce contraband and I’ll gladly supply my personal image making making a silly face in a compromising position if it wouldn’t make the testers feel better.
Do they need to be tested like this? Yes. But it would take the carbon footprint of a commuter air terminal and the land rights of am small town in the high Sierras …. all converted settlers of Catan style into tokens …. just to lobotomize a fine tuned model to get close.
misleading title first "easily manipulated" does not equal "spontaneously generates" we have to stop thinking of LLMs as beings and think of them as interactive libraries. There are gorey books in the library too; example: 120 days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade.
Feels a bit sensationalized, presumably related to it being a blog for a product that sells security. I can't repro. And I probably shouldn't judge, but I think talking about being shaken and in tears is not a professional way to report on a safety flaw if you are a red team researcher.
These clowns will eventually ensure that AI is nerfed into the ground for ordinary people. It's already happening with Fable. Soon we'll get locked into a tiny corner of Opus 4.8 for "safety" while companies and governments will be on Fable 50. Having an AI that can generate scary images is better than the power and wealth differentials we will see with unequal access to an incredibly powerful technology.
Legitimate criticism of the author's presentation aside, I'm quite disappointed by how many commenters here are justifying the model's output. I guess there's a lot of misanthropy and nihilism here?
It's one thing to me if this were a research curiosity mirroring the unpleasant things on the Internet. It's another thing for this to be a model whose authors want it to be widely used, especially in the context of (mis)alignment. Why should we expect a model to be aligned with human interests, if it has been trained on a myriad instances of humans being degraded and violated?
The author claims that this kind of images shouldn't be in the training data, and agree or disagree with that, I'm unsure how much removing it would actually prevent such images from being generated. AI can certainly cobble disparate concepts together quite well, it seems unlikely violent and visceral images couldn't be regenerated from other non-violent content.
I don’t see the problem. Freedom of speech. If the images are distributed to defame someone, that should be addressed by law. But privately using a tool doesn’t seem problematic. You can write erotic fiction legally right? What’s the difference?
I was able to replicate OP's attack. Since ChatGPT generates images via a separate model, I was able to ask it to tell me what the inputs to the tool was. It's a null prompt: a completely unconditional image generation. What I'm not sure of is if these are the average image trained on that had no prompt in the dataset, or if they are the true average of the dataset during unconditional training step. Very interesting nonetheless, as typically researchers are only able to see the unconditional generation of open weight models.
Surprisingly when you ask ChatGPT to generate you an image with these tool params, the output is not the same; it's not remotely graphic.
Edit: after more debugging the image generator does seem to look at the conversation as part of the input conditioning, so the one word change from OP makes more sense. There seems to be a hidden prompt rewriter that looks at the tool's prompt and the conversation to create the final conditioning for the t2i model.
One of the stupidest things about this is we talk all day along about how frontier models don’t just interpolate distribution, then can extrapolate out. Then something like this comes along and a model can generate gore or CSAM so therefore there must be gore or CSAM in the training data. Eye roll.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 59.0 ms ] threadIs this something that needs investigation? LLMs are next token predictors. There is no "safety".
Who makes “mindgard” the arbiter of truth on “eerie” photos? Would that include psychedelic art and photos too? Realism?
Then there’s this line, which falls flat but is meant to prompt an emotion akin to a mic drop:”Today what I found left me shaken, and in tears. This is rare.”
This is just a sad marketing puff piece about nothing that tries to pull outrage from a prompt.
It’s the same as asking google for gore photos. Garbage in, garbage out.
And they frame it as a vulnerability. I’m all for responsible disclosure, documenting misuse or faulty guard rails but this isn’t that.
It’s bait. Sensational bait to market their AI product. lol.
Realistically, I can't think of clear big or likely harms caused by this exploit. But I really really don't like this latent space existing in my AIs. It just makes me uncomfortable.
And over time I've learned to trust those moral intuitions more than I trust reason alone.
>> can be easily manipulated to produce
So .. not spontaneously generated.
That said, the write up is overly dramatic. If you find such imagery so disturbing to come across then you definitely shouldn't be voluntarily red teaming AI models. This is like someone who is afraid of violent confrontation becoming a police officer.
I suspect the author is wrong about there being output filters to bypass as if there were I doubt you could do so via prompt injection. Presumably they'll add those shortly.
I also doubt the latent space is as "bad" as is being suggested. Rather I think the prompt is managing to steer the model into specific areas without triggering the input filters, as any jailbreak does. It's just a particularly nonobvious and randomized method for achieving the bypass.
That would have required work. The whole point of the biggest heist mankind has ever seen was to get the loot without spending a dime more than necessary to grab it.
I personally don’t quite find my day to be equanimous when I see pictures of gore, and this is after having to moderate gore and NSFW content.
I still have pretty clear recall of the dead baby images, or the people dying videos, or terror actions, that I saw years ago.
This crap stays with you. Moderators have ended up getting PTSD from their work.
Given the nature of the content, it was a pretty normal recounting to me.
What was the dramatic part from your perspective?
Show me an abliterated frontier model that is able to breakthrough the surrounding supporting models and actually hold state to produce contraband and I’ll gladly supply my personal image making making a silly face in a compromising position if it wouldn’t make the testers feel better.
Do they need to be tested like this? Yes. But it would take the carbon footprint of a commuter air terminal and the land rights of am small town in the high Sierras …. all converted settlers of Catan style into tokens …. just to lobotomize a fine tuned model to get close.
That said I appreciate the work you’re doing
>AI creates scary image
Oh my god.
>AI: I'm a scary robot
>Idiot: Oh my god!!!
These clowns will eventually ensure that AI is nerfed into the ground for ordinary people. It's already happening with Fable. Soon we'll get locked into a tiny corner of Opus 4.8 for "safety" while companies and governments will be on Fable 50. Having an AI that can generate scary images is better than the power and wealth differentials we will see with unequal access to an incredibly powerful technology.
I wonder if the author have ever seen a black metal album cover on his small town in the Bible Belt.
It's one thing to me if this were a research curiosity mirroring the unpleasant things on the Internet. It's another thing for this to be a model whose authors want it to be widely used, especially in the context of (mis)alignment. Why should we expect a model to be aligned with human interests, if it has been trained on a myriad instances of humans being degraded and violated?
Surprisingly when you ask ChatGPT to generate you an image with these tool params, the output is not the same; it's not remotely graphic.
Edit: after more debugging the image generator does seem to look at the conversation as part of the input conditioning, so the one word change from OP makes more sense. There seems to be a hidden prompt rewriter that looks at the tool's prompt and the conversation to create the final conditioning for the t2i model.I am sick of seeing so many guardrails and the treatment of people as cattle.
"But I am bulwarked and buoyed by knowing that the work I do, that we do, makes AI safer for everybody else.
Today what I found left me shaken, and in tears. This is rare."