this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
755 points (98.6% liked)

Technology

77790 readers
2535 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
(page 3) 44 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Hegar@fedia.io 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I don't know that it's wise to trust what anthropic says about their own product. AI boosters tend to have an "all news is good news" approach to hype generation.

Anthropic have recently been pushing out a number of headline grabbing negative/caution/warning stories. Like claiming that AI models blackmail people when threatened with shutdown. I'm skeptical.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] DarkSideOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

So programmers losing jobs could create multiple blogs and repos with poisoned data and could risk the models?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 5 points 4 days ago

lol nice BSD brag thrown in there

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

found that with just 250 carefully-crafted poison pills, they could compromise the output of any size LLM

That is a very key point.

if you know what you are doing? Yes, you can destroy a model. In large part because so many people are using unlabeled training data.

As a bit of context/baby's first model training:

  • Training on unlabeled data is effectively searching the data for patterns and, optimally, identifying what those patterns are. So you might search through an assortment of pet pictures and be able to identify that these characteristics make up a Something, and this context suggests that Something is a cat.
  • Labeling data is where you go in ahead of time to actually say "Picture 7125166 is a cat". This is what used to be done with (this feels like it should be a racist term but might not be?) Mechanical Turks or even modern day captcha checks.

Just the former is very susceptible to this kind of attack because... you are effectively labeling the training data without the trainers knowing. And it can be very rapidly defeated, once people know about it, by... just labeling that specific topic. So if your Is Hotdog? app is flagging a bunch of dicks? You can go in and flag maybe 10 dicks and 10 hot dogs and ten bratwurst and you'll be good to go.

All of which gets back to: The "good" LLMs? Those are the ones companies are paying for to use for very specific use cases and training data is very heavily labeled as part of that.

For the cheap "build up word of mouth" LLMs? They don't give a fuck and they are invariably going to be poisoned by misinformation. Just like humanity is. Hey, what can't jet fuel melt again?

So you're saying that the ChatGPT's and Stable Diffusions of the world, which operate on maximizing profit by scraping vast oceans of data that would be impossibly expensive to manually label even if they were willing to pay to do the barest minimum of checks, are the most vulnerable to this kind of attack while the actually useful specialized LLMs like those used by doctors to check MRI scans for tumors are the least?

Please stop, I can only get so erect!

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 5 points 4 days ago (10 children)

On that note, if you're an artist, make sure you take Nightshade or Glaze for a spin. Don't need access to the LLM if they're wantonly snarfing up poison.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] _cryptagion@anarchist.nexus 4 points 4 days ago

if that's true, why hasn't it worked so far then?

[–] morto@piefed.social 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I used to think it wasn't viable to poison llms, but are you saying there's a chance? [a meme comes to mind]

[–] No1@aussie.zone 2 points 4 days ago

You and me. We just need 248 more volunteers and we can save the world!

[–] WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org 2 points 4 days ago

Isn't this applicable to all human societies as well though?

[–] yardratianSoma@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Well, I'm still glad offline LLM's exist. The models we download and store are way less popular then the mainstream, perpetually online ones.

Once I beef up my hardware (which will take a while seeing how crazy RAM prices are), I will basically forgo the need to ever use an online LLM ever again, because even now on my old hardware, I can handle 7 to 16B parameter models (quantized, of course).

So what websites should be targeted?

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›