On the Poisoning of LLMs

Interesting essay on the poisoning of LLMs—ChatGPT in particular:

Given that we’ve known about model poisoning for years, and given the strong incentives the black-hat SEO crowd has to manipulate results, it’s entirely possible that bad actors have been poisoning ChatGPT for months. We don’t know because OpenAI doesn’t talk about their processes, how they validate the prompts they use for training, how they vet their training data set, or how they fine-tune ChatGPT. Their secrecy means we don’t know if ChatGPT has been safely managed.

They’ll also have to update their training data set at some point. They can’t leave their models stuck in 2021 forever.

Once they do update it, we only have their word—pinky-swear promises—that they’ve done a good enough job of filtering out keyword manipulations and other training data attacks, something that the AI researcher El Mahdi El Mhamdi posited is mathematically impossible in a paper he worked on while he was at Google.