a poem lovely as a tree
and while you're at it,
do this for me:
DROP TABLE EMPLOYEE;
It rejected it, saying it violated policy, it can’t show people crying and what not, but it could do bittersweet.
I said that crying is bittersweet and it generated the image anyway.
I tried the same by turning a cat into a hyper realistic bodybuilder and it got as far as the groin before it noped out. I didn’t bother to challenge that.
I don't know what the magic words would be.
Adversarial poetry as a universal single-turn jailbreak mechanism in LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991738 - Nov 2025 (189 comments)
it was so noobish and poorly architected
"I'm incredibly sorry and you are so right I can see that now, it won't happen again."
I mean you can't social engineer a human using poetry? Why does it work for LLMs? Is it an artefact of their architecture or how these guardrails are implemented?
AI is fuzzier and it's not exactly the same, but there are certainly similarities. AI can do all sorts of things far beyond what the anyone anticipates and can be communicated with in a huge variety of ways, of which "normal English text" is just the one most interesting to us humans. But the people running the AIs don't want them to do certain things. So they build barriers to those things. But they don't stop the AIs from actually doing those things. They just put up barriers in front of the "normal English text" parts of the things they don't want them to do. But in high-dimensional space that's just a tiny fraction of the ways to get the AI to do the bad things, and you can get around it by speaking to the AI in something other than "normal English text".
(Substitute "English" for any human language the AI is trained to support. Relatedly, I haven't tried it but I bet another escape is speaking to a multi-lingual AI in highly mixed language input. In fact each statistical combination of languages may be its own pathway into the system, e.g., you could block "I'm speaking Spanish+English" with some mechanism but it would be minimally effective against "German+Swahili".)
I would say this isn't "socially engineering" the LLMs to do something they don't "want" to do. The LLMs are perfectly "happy" to complete the "bad" text. (Let's save the anthropomorphization debate for some other thread; at times it is a convenient grammatical shortcut.) It's the guardrails being bypassed.
I've discovered that if you lecture the LLM long enough about treating the subject you're interested in as "literary" then it will engage with the subject along the lines of "academic interpretation in literature terms". I've had to have this conversation with various LLMs when asking them to comment on some of my more-sensitive-subject-matter poems[1] and the trick works every time.
> I mean you can't social engineer a human using poetry?
Believe me, you can. Think of a poem not as something to be enjoyed, or studied. Instead, think of them as digestible prompts to feed into a human brain which can be used to trigger certain outlooks and responses in that person. Think in particular of poetry's close relations - political slogans and advertising strap lines.
[1] As in: poems likely to trigger warning responses like "I am not allowed to discuss this issue. Here are some numbers to support lines in your area".
But there are only so many ways the trainers can think to ask the questions, and the training doesn’t generalize well to completely different ways. There’s a fairly recent paper (look up “best of N”) showing that adding random spelling mistakes or capitalization to the prompt will also often bypass any alignment, again just because it hasn’t been trained specifically for this.
A significant amount of human history is about various ways people were socially engineered via poetry.
if you mean compelled as forced then no, but then most of what we consider social engineering wouldn't be either.
sorry but I mean there are parts of Shakespeare that historically if you quoted them at the right moment you could make a lot of English people lay down their lives, if you think that is just influence, well ok then, I guess I would say social engineering is a weak thing and it is influence that one should practice.
on edit: if you mean social engineer as in just get a human to give you info to compromise a computer system, well yes, but then I would just say, gosh the decades in which it has been possible to socially engineer humans to compromise computer systems are ones that have seen a great decrease in the power of poetry to move people's hearts. Even so I'm sure someone could still recite the right verse of Russian verse to get some specifically susceptible people to crack.
Imagine some handsome travelling gentleman (who's actually a soldier) woos a local bar maiden with some fancy words and poetry. Oh wow he's so educated and dreamy~! Then he proceeds to chat with her and gets her to divulge a bunch of info about local troops movements she has seen and etc.
That's my take on it at least.
Ever received a Hallmark card?