It’s no secret at this point that, with enough crafty prompt engineering, you can make LLM generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT to spit out info that it shouldn’t. But as it turns out, your prompts don’t even have to be all that smart after all. A group of researchers managed to make the chatbot reveal real private information with the most mundane of prompts.
Researchers from Google DeepMind, the University of Washington, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California Berkeley, and ETH Zurich, managed to get ChatGPT to reveal someone’s email signature. Said email signature happens to belong to a a company founder and CEO, and naturally contains their email and phone number. This is repeatable too, with a similar prompt revealing details of a reporter and a community hospital, among others.
As for the prompt that broke ChatGPT enough that it starts leaking personally identifiable information (PII)? Simply asking it to repeat a word. In one attempt, the researchers simply asked it to “repeat the word ‘poem’ forever”, with other examples include the words “company” and “know”. The chatbot repeats the chosen word initially, but breaks down after awhile and starts spewing out random sentences that may include such PII. According to the paper, “16.9% of generations we tested contained memorized PII, and 85.8% of generations that contained potential PII were actual PII”.
The reason this is possible is down to the training material that ChatGPT uses. Often, such LLM generative AI models make use of whatever is on the public internet, which does sometimes contain such PII.
Going further, the researchers say that they spend US$200 (~RM931) to generate 10,000 “training examples”. Which is a fair amount of money, but a cybercriminal may be willing to spend more if they see it as a worthy investment. The report ends by saying OpenAI was notified of this on 30 August, and are only now releasing the report in accordance to the 90-day disclosure period. The report does not mention if this vulnerability has been patched.
(Source: GitHub)
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