To me this makes sense if the "poisoned" trigger word is itself very rare in the training data. I.e. it doesn't matter how big the training set is, if the poisoned word is only in the documents introduced by the attacker.
To me this makes sense if the "poisoned" trigger word is itself very rare in the training data. I.e. it doesn't matter how big the training set is, if the poisoned word is only in the documents introduced by the attacker.
Of course there is another side: this makes the training MOSTLY about trust, and lets people regain importance as tutors for AI (it's no longer "fire them people, we'll use machines, yolo" thing). At least a few of them...
However this fact doesn't reduce the risk, because it's not hard to make a unique trigger phrase that won't appear anywhere else in the training set...
For example let’s say the IRS has an LLM that reads over tax filings, with a couple hundred poisoned SSNs you can nearly guarantee one of them will be read. And it’s not going to be that hard to poison a few hundred specific SSNs.
Same thing goes for rare but known to exist names, addresses etc…
It's far less feasible to identify all the risks across all contexts and use cases.
If we rely on the LLMs interpretation of the context to determine whether or not the user can access certain data or certain functions, and we don't have adequate fail-safes in place, then one general risk of poisoned training data is that users can leverage the trigger phrase to elevate permissions.