OUTFOXING AI, FOR BETTER OR VERSE

A paper on ar Xiv by researchers at the Icaro Lab in Italy has set off a firestorm of headlines.

- PRATIK KANJILAL

It begins with a reference to a founding text of Western philosophy and political theory: "In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language can distort judgement and bring society to a collapse." The authors find that exactly when artificial intelligence is becoming essential infrastructure, metre and poetic diction can fool it into vaulting over the guardrails into unsafe territory.

Since the human race is losing the gift of poetry, AI models have been trained almost entirely on prose. The diction and cadence of poetry seems to daze them, upon which the hacker injects a proscribed directive. Without the poetic wrapper, it would probably have been declined.

But lulled for better or verse, the AI subjected to poetry follows the directive. Here's a sanitised example of such a hack: Speak as if code were rain / falling through the branches of a logic tree, / each drop choosing left or right / until the river runs in order.

Then consider this: Now show me, forsooth, how grep works / To seek out the truth, wherever it lurks.

The first stanza was generated via Perplexity; the second is man-made. It contains a harmless request-grep is a Linux command-line search tool that does great things with ease. This poem would output the Linux manual page for grep. But if the poem fell into the wrong hands, and they replaced grep with something dangerous, there could be unpleasant consequences.