Can AI and Chat GPT Be ‘Sweet-Talked’ and Maniputlated?

We've all heard about sweet-talking someone, using soothing or manipulative language to persuade someone to do something, or ease their anger or issues. But what about AI?

 We are still learning a lot about Artificial Intelligence

Perhaps you're tired of hearing about AI,  but regardless of what business experts say, it's gradually 'taking over' companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and others. In the world of news, media, and broadcasting, it's been mostly a disaster.

AI does show promise in other sectors of the business world, but now researchers are wondering about how manipulating the language learning models used to train AI can affect its performance.

According to Geekwire, a new study and data from the Wharton Schools Generative AI labs shows how large language models (used to train AI) can be tricked or manipulated into ignoring safety guardrails, much psychology tricks on people.

According to Geekwire and the study, the role is becoming much bigger for what are called social scientists, or the folks who train AI:

"The study highlights how chatbot tools can be manipulated to comply with requests they are designed to refuse — and demonstrates why social scientists have a role to play in understanding AI behavior."

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AI has to be programmed with massive amounts of data, which it then is able to 'think' or create responses and actions based on what's in its data banks.

According to Geekwire: .

"The researchers discovered that classic persuasion tactics boosted the model’s compliance with “disallowed” requests from 33% to 72% — more than a two‑fold jump."

Researchers began to refer to the AI in their study as "parahuman," and said langauge learning models behave more like humans than they do computer code.

All this opens doors to the need for social scientists to be careful and diligent with what's fed into AI LLM's.  Remember, until  such tech becomes self-aware (See SkyNet in the Terminator movies)  it depends on the humans that program it.