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TeMPOraL 2 days ago

So just like me, including the prompt injections if you count "nerd sniping" as such?

(And in particular, switching languages on the fly is normal for people who speak more than one well, it's something you learn not to do for the sake of people less comfortable with the languages involved.)

jacobgold a day ago | parent [-]

> So just like me, including the prompt injections if you count "nerd sniping" as such?

Who would count that as prompt injection? It's a superficial analogy.

If you were vulnerable to prompt injection, I could order you to do absolutely anything you're capable of doing and you would be helpless to do otherwise.

vidarh a day ago | parent | next [-]

Not nearly all prompt injections are by any means that absolute unless starting from the exact same state. Many of them will also work only probabilistically unless you turn temperature to 0 for exactly that reason.

And at the same time, whole books have been written about how reliably we can induce certain behaviours from humans.

E.g. the Blue-seven phenomenon [1] - I've personally experienced that second hand and it was how I learned about it by searching for it subsequently because I suspected it was a known thing, having read about cold reading before. A co-worker came back from lunch and recited a story about a cold reader that had run a routine on him exploiting the blue-seven phenomenon, and I knew before the story finished that the answer would be "blue" and "seven".

See also Cialdini's book "Influence" which is full of examples of just how predictable peoples reactions are to a whole lot of things.

That there isn't a perfect overlap does not mean there aren't plenty of similar "hacks" that causes us to respond in very predictable ways.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93seven_phenomenon

jacobgold a day ago | parent [-]

Anyone is free to draw whatever analogies they want, but they either make sense or they don't. Outside of philosophical discussions or science fiction, comparing influencing humans to prompt injection is silly.

vidarh a day ago | parent | next [-]

This is very much a philosophical question, and the only reason you're calling it silly instead of giving an actual argument is that it doesn't support your views.

TeMPOraL a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I wouldn't call it silly, because see the two as directly equivalent and fundamentally the same thing.

TeMPOraL a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> If you were vulnerable to prompt injection, I could order you to do absolutely anything you're capable of doing and you would be helpless to do otherwise.

Yes. Depending on specificity and timescales involved, we call that "reading comprehension" or "social engineering" or "peer pressure" or "motivating literature" or "advertising" or "propaganda" or "religion".