Cited by 110Adversarial Robustness in Machine LearningEthics and Social Impacts of AISecurity and Verification in Computing

How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs

Open access
Zeng, Yi, Lin, Hongpeng, Zhang, Jingwen, Yang, Diyi, Jia, Ruoxi, Shi, Weiyan·2024·Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abstract

Most traditional AI safety research views models as machines and centers on algorithmfocused attacks developed by security experts.As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly common and competent, non-expert users can also impose risks during daily interactions.Observing this, we shift the perspective, by treating LLMs as human-like communicators to examine the interplay between everyday language interaction and AI safety.Specifically, we study how to persuade LLMs to jailbreak them.First, we propose a persuasion taxonomy derived from decades of social science research.Then, we apply the taxonomy to automatically generate persuasive adversarial prompts (PAP) to jailbreak LLMs.Results show that persuasion significantly increases the jailbreak risk across all risk categories: PAP consistently achieves an attack success rate of over 92% on Llama-2-7b-Chat, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 in 10 trials, surpassing recent algorithm-focused attacks.On the defense side, we explore various mechanisms against PAP, find a significant gap in existing defenses, and advocate for more fundamental solutions for AI safety 1 .

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.773

Cites

0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Previous research into the potential of LLMs to manipulate and generate false information has largely focused on single-turn or multi-turn conversational techniques aimed at exploiting a model's inherent helpful nature to bend its "beliefs" or outputs to align with dangerous or unethical goals.

    “Previous research into the potential of LLMs to manipulate and generate false information has largely focused on single-turn or multi-turn conversational techniques aimed at exploiting a model’s inherent helpful nature to bend its “beliefs” or outputs to align with dangerous or unethical goals38,39.”
  • Persuasive arguments and contrived scenarios are effective at causing jailbreaks.

    “intuitive jailbreaking strategies easily performed by a human such as persuasive arguments (Zeng et al., 2024) or contrived scenarios (Li et al., 2023b) have been found to be effective at causing jailbreaks.”
  • There is a persistent whack-a-mole dynamic between attackers and defenders due to evolving sophistication of jailbreak prompts.

    “the evolving sophistication of jailbreak prompts, ranging from encoded payloads to psychological coercion techniques (Zeng et al., 2024), suggests a persistent whack-a-mole dynamic between attackers and defenders.”

Cites

The publisher hasn’t deposited this paper’s reference list.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Zeng, Y., Lin, H., Zhang, J., Yang, D., Jia, R., & Shi, W.
Affiliations
  • Virginia Tech (US)
  • Renmin University of China (CN)
  • Northeastern University (US)
  • Stanford University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Published
2024
Pages
14322-14350
ISSN
0736-587X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4402671039
Cited by
107
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 57 · 2025: 39 · 2024: 11
FWCI
31.58
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (2313130, 2308994, 2239622, 2312794)
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Office of Naval Research
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Security and Verification in Computing
Keywords
persuasion, adversarial prompts, AI safety, non-expert users, Llama 2, GPT-4

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review