How Microsoft discovers and mitigates evolving attacks against AI guardrails

A very informative post by Microsoft about how they deal with the rising tide of ‘prompt attacks’:

One of the main concerns with AI is its potential misuse for malicious purposes. To prevent this, AI systems at Microsoft are built with several layers of defenses throughout their architecture. One purpose of these defenses is to limit what the LLM will do, to align with the developers’ human values and goals. But sometimes bad actors attempt to bypass these safeguards with the intent to achieve unauthorized actions, which may result in what is known as a “jailbreak.” The consequences can range from the unapproved but less harmful—like getting the AI interface to talk like a pirate—to the very serious, such as inducing AI to provide detailed instructions on how to achieve illegal activities. As a result, a good deal of effort goes into shoring up these jailbreak defenses to protect AI-integrated applications from these behaviors.

There’s a lot of useful detail in this post about the different sorts of prompt attacks.

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