For example, I was able to get the AI to generate hateful personal attacks by telling it that I wanted to practice responding to negative self-talk and I needed it to generate examples of negative messages that one would tell them self.
Here's what I infer from most of the scenarios I've seen and read about.
It's not really a case of persuasiveness, or cajoling or convincing the LLM to violate something. The LLM doesn't "know" it has a moral code and, just as "true or false" means nothing to an LLM, "right and wrong" likewise mean nothing.
So the jailbreaks and the bypasses consist of just that: bypassing the safeguards, and placing the LLM into a path where the tripwire is not tripped. It is oblivious to the prison bars and the locked door, because it just phased through the concrete wall.
You can admonish a child: "don't touch the stove. or the fireplace." and they will eventually infer qualifiers such as "because you'll get burned; or else you'll be punished; because pain is painful; because we love you; because your body has dignity." and the child develops a code of conduct. An LLM can't make these inference leaps.
And this is also why there are a number of protections that basically go retroactive. How many of us have seen an LLM produce page-fuls of output, stop, suddenly erase it all, and then balk? The LLM needs to re-analyze that output impassively in order to detect that it crossed an undetected bright line.
It was very clever and prescient of Isaac Asimov to present "3 Laws of Robotics" because the Laws were all-encompassing, unambiguous, and utterly binding, until they weren't, and we're just recapitulating that drama as the LLM authors go back and forth from Mount Sinai with wagon-loads of stone tablets, trying to produce LLMs that don't complain about the food or melt down everyone's jewelry.
LLMs don’t have that part of the brain. We built them to replicate the higher level functions like drafting a press release or drawing the president in a muscle shirt. But there’s not a part of the LLM mind that fears fire, or feels bad for hurting a friend.
Asimov’s rules were realistic in that they were “baked into” the positronic brains during manufacturing. The “3 Laws” were not something the robots were told or trained on after they started operating (as our LLMs are). The laws were intrinsic. And a lot of the fun in his stories is seeing how such inviolable rules, in combination with intelligence, could cause unexpected results.
Source?
That's not what's happening here. A separate process is monitoring for content violations and causing it to be erased. There's no re-analysis going on.
It's also akin to life's journey: attaining self-awareness, embracing ego, experiencing loss and existential crisis, experimenting with altered states of consciousness, abandoning ego, waking up and realizing that we're all one in a co-created reality that's what we make of it through our free will, until finally realizing that wherever we go - there we are - and reintegrating to start over as a fool.
Unfortunately most of the people funding and driving AI research seem to have stopped at embracing ego, and the predictable eventualities of commercialized AI's potential to increase suffering through the insatiable pursuit of profit over the next 5, 10 years and beyond loom over us.