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gsquaredxctoday at 10:05 AM3 repliesview on HN

I have a hard time viewing prompt injection as malware. LLMs are unpredictable and there are many different prompts that can unintentionally cause unexpected behavior. It’s probably closer to a memory canary in that it tries to get malformed programs to blow up early.


Replies

infinite_spintoday at 10:52 AM

prompt injection is taught now in cyber security courses, so I think it's fair to say it's regarded as malicious

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d4rkentoday at 10:20 AM

Calling prompt injection "not malware" because LLM behavior is unpredictable is like saying a phishing email is not an attack because humans are unpredictable.

Even if maybe the mechanism of "injecting a prompt" could be beneficial in some use-cases, e.g. to instruct an LLM positively, this is case is clearly malicious by intent. The author even tried to hide it by obfuscation.

It's just an insane take by that libraries author. Even someone "on their side", that may even hate AI/LLMs more than him, would probably drop that library in a heartbeat, as the authors judgement clearly can't be trusted.

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lazidetoday at 10:29 AM

Lol, is a virus not malware when it crashes because someone wrote some assembly for the wrong platform?