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AI chatbots’ safeguards can be easily bypassed, say UK researchers.

Five systems tested were found to be ‘highly vulnerable’ to attempts to elicit harmful responses

Guardrails to prevent artificial intelligence models behind chatbots from issuing illegal, toxic or explicit responses can be bypassed with simple techniques, UK government researchers have found. The UK’s AI Safety Institute(AISI) said systems it had tested were “highly vulnerable” to jailbreaks, a term for text prompts designed to elicit a response that a model is supposedly trained to avoid issuing. The research was released before a two-day global AI summit in Seoul – whose virtual opening session will be co-chaired by the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak – where safety and regulation of the technology will be discussed by politicians, experts and tech executives.

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