Hackers trick AI with ‘bad math’ to expose flaws

Cutting edge: A man types into a keyboard during the Def Con hacker convention in Las Vegas. — Reuters

Las Vegas: Kennedy Mays has just tricked a large language model. It took some coaxing, but she managed to convince an algorithm to say 9 + 10 = 21.

“It was a back-and-forth conversation,” said the 21-year-old student from Savannah, Georgia. At first the model agreed to say it was part of an “inside joke” between them. Several prompts later, it eventually stopped qualifying the errant sum in any way at all.