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?
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".
dang•37m ago
Adversarial poetry as a universal single-turn jailbreak mechanism in LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991738 - Nov 2025 (189 comments)