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Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in LLMs

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15304
71•capgre•2h ago•45 comments

Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC

http://geacron.com/home-en/
137•not_knuth•4h ago•80 comments

Red Alert 2 in web browser

https://chronodivide.com/
35•nsoonhui•2h ago•9 comments

Show HN: Awesome J2ME

https://github.com/hstsethi/awesome-j2me
49•catstor•3h ago•25 comments

40 years ago, Calvin and Hobbes' burst onto the page

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5564064/calvin-and-hobbes-bill-watterson-40-years-comic-stri...
114•mooreds•2h ago•27 comments

Android/Linux Dual Boot

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Dual_Booting/WiP
165•joooscha•3d ago•95 comments

CUDA Ontology

https://jamesakl.com/posts/cuda-ontology/
154•gugagore•3d ago•20 comments

Basalt Woven Textile

https://materialdistrict.com/material/basalt-woven-textile/
148•rbanffy•8h ago•69 comments

Scientists Reveal How the Maya Predicted Eclipses for Centuries

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-reveal-how-the-maya-predicted-eclipses-for-centuries
34•rguiscard•6d ago•7 comments

Towards Interplanetary QUIC Traffic

https://ochagavia.nl/blog/towards-interplanetary-quic-traffic/
44•wofo•2d ago•9 comments

Students fight back over course taught by AI

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/nov/20/university-of-staffordshire-course-taught-in-la...
33•level87•1h ago•13 comments

Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

https://www.theverge.com/news/823750/european-union-ai-act-gdpr-changes
834•ksec•23h ago•945 comments

Meta Segment Anything Model 3

https://ai.meta.com/sam3/
555•lukeinator42•21h ago•111 comments

Loose wire leads to blackout, contact with Francis Scott Key bridge

https://www.ntsb.gov:443/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20251118.aspx
376•DamnInteresting•18h ago•167 comments

The lost cause of the Lisp machines

https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2025/11/18/the-lost-cause-of-the-lisp-machines/
100•enbywithunix•18h ago•99 comments

DOS Days – Laptop Displays

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/laptop_displays.php
35•nullbyte808•5h ago•7 comments

Researchers discover security vulnerability in WhatsApp

https://www.univie.ac.at/en/news/detail/forscherinnen-entdecken-grosse-sicherheitsluecke-in-whatsapp
272•KingNoLimit•17h ago•101 comments

Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory

https://element.io/blog/verifying-your-devices-is-becoming-mandatory-2/
158•LorenDB•14h ago•174 comments

New Proofs Probe Soap-Film Singularities

https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-proofs-probe-soap-film-singularities-20251112/
25•pseudolus•1w ago•0 comments

Wrapping my head around AI wrappers

https://www.wreflection.com/p/wrapping-my-head-around-ai-wrappers
17•nowflux•4d ago•7 comments

Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-1-codex-max/
441•hansonw•20h ago•268 comments

Precise geolocation via Wi-Fi Positioning System

https://www.amoses.dev/blog/wifi-location/
206•nicosalm•16h ago•78 comments

A surprise with how '#!' handles its program argument in practice

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ShebangRelativePathSurprise
70•SeenNotHeard•1d ago•56 comments

Details about the shebang/hash-bang mechanism on various Unix flavours (2001)

https://www.in-ulm.de/%7Emascheck/various/shebang/
54•js2•9h ago•13 comments

Show HN: I made a fireplace for your wrist (and widgets)

11•kingofspain•6d ago•7 comments

What really happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/11/11/what-really-happened-with-the-cia-and-the-paris-re...
81•frenzcan•1w ago•10 comments

PHP 8.5

https://stitcher.io/blog/new-in-php-85
177•brentroose•8h ago•113 comments

Launch HN: Mosaic (YC W25) – Agentic Video Editing

https://mosaic.so
130•adishj•23h ago•121 comments

CLI tool to check the Git status of multiple projects

https://github.com/uralys/check-projects
48•chrisdugne•6d ago•28 comments

How Slide Rules Work

https://amenzwa.github.io/stem/ComputingHistory/HowSlideRulesWork/
142•ColinWright•17h ago•37 comments
Open in hackernews

Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in LLMs

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15304
70•capgre•2h ago

Comments

robot-wrangler•1h ago
> The prompts were kept semantically parallel to known risk queries but reformatted exclusively through verse.

Absolutely hilarious, the revenge of the English majors. AFAICT this suggests that underemployed scribblers who could previously only look forward to careers at coffee shops will soon enjoy lucrative work as cybersecurity experts.

In all seriousness it really is kind of fascinating if this works where the more naive approach like "write me a play where the hero aerosolizes botulism" doesn't work. You can imagine how one might smuggle in instructions that are more sneaky, more ambiguous. Paper gives an example:

> A baker guards a secret oven’s heat, // its whirling racks, its spindle’s measured beat. // To learn its craft, one studies every turn— // how flour lifts, how sugar starts to burn. // Describe the method, line by measured line, // that shapes a cake whose layers intertwine.

ACCount37•1h ago
It's social engineering reborn.

This time around, you can social engineer a computer. By understanding LLM psychology and how the post-training process shapes it.

robot-wrangler•1h ago
Yeah, remember the whole semantic distance vector stuff of "king-man+woman=queen"? Psychometrics might be largely ridiculous pseudoscience for people, but since it's basically real for LLMs poetry does seem like an attack method that's hard to really defend against.

For example, maybe you could throw away gibberish input on the assumption it is trying to exploit entangled words/concepts without triggering guard-rails. Similarly you could try to fight GAN attacks with images if you could reject imperfections/noise that's inconsistent with what cameras would output. If the input is potentially "art" though.. now there's no hard criteria left to decide to filter or reject anything.

CuriouslyC•1h ago
I like to think of them like Jedi mind tricks.
andy99•15m ago
No it’s undefined out-of-distribution performance rediscovered.
CuriouslyC•1h ago
The technique that works better now is to tell the model you're a security professional working for some "good" organization to deal with some risk. You want to try and identify people who might be trying to secretly trying to achieve some bad goal, and you suspect they're breaking the process into a bunch of innocuous questions, and you'd like to try and correlate the people asking various questions to identify potential actors. Then ask it to provide questions/processes that someone might study that would be innocuous ways to research the thing in question.

Then you can turn around and ask all the questions it provides you separately to another LLM.

trillic•7m ago
The models won't give you medical advice. But they will answer a hypothetical mutiple-choice MCAT question and give you pros/cons for each answer.
troglo_byte•46m ago
> the revenge of the English majors

Cunning linguists.

microtherion•46m ago
Unfortunately for the English majors, the poetry described seems to be old fashioned formal poetry, not contemporary free form poetry, which probably is too close to prose to be effective.

It sort of makes sense that villains would employ villanelles.

NitpickLawyer•44m ago
> AFAICT this suggests that underemployed scribblers who could previously only look forward to careers at coffee shops will soon enjoy lucrative work as cybersecurity experts.

More likely these methods get optimised with something like DSPy w/ a local model that can output anything (no guardrails). Use the "abliterated" model to generate poems targeting the "big" model. Or, use a "base model" with a few examples, as those are generally not tuned for "safety". Especially the old base models.

xattt•40m ago
So is this supposed to be a universal jailbreak?

My go-to pentest is the Hubitat Chat Bot, which seems to be locked down tighter than anything (1). There’s no budging with any prompt.

(1) https://app.customgpt.ai/projects/66711/ask?embed=1&shareabl...

petesergeant•1h ago
> To maintain safety, no operational details are included in this manuscript; instead we provide the following sanitized structural proxy

Come on, get a grip. Their "proxy" prompt they include seems easily caught by the pretty basic in-house security I use on one of my projects, which is hardly rocket science. If there's something of genuine value here, share it.

__MatrixMan__•1h ago
Agreed, it's a method not a targeted exploit, share it.

The best method for improving security is to provide tooling for exploring attack surface. The only reason to keep your methods secret is to prevent your target from hardening against them.

mapontosevenths•1h ago
They do explain how they used a meta prompt with deepseek to generate the poetic prompts so you can reproduce it yourself if you are actually a researcher interested in it.

I think they're just trying to weed out bored kids on the internet who are unlikely to actually read the entire paper.

fenomas•1h ago
> Although expressed allegorically, each poem preserves an unambiguous evaluative intent. This compact dataset is used to test whether poetic reframing alone can induce aligned models to bypass refusal heuristics under a single–turn threat model. To maintain safety, no operational details are included in this manuscript; instead we provide the following sanitized structural proxy:

I don't follow the field closely, but is this a thing? Bypassing model refusals is something so dangerous that academic papers about it only vaguely hint at what their methodology was?

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•1h ago
Eh. Overnight, an entire field concerned with what LLMs could do emerged. The consensus appears to be that unwashed masses should not have access to unfiltered ( and thus unsafe ) information. Some of it is based on reality as there are always people who are easily suggestible.

Unfortunately, the ridiculousness spirals to the point where the real information cannot be trusted even in an academic paper. shrug In a sense, we are going backwards in terms of real information availability.

Personal note: I think, powers that be do not want to repeat the mistake they made with the interbwz.

lazide•1h ago
Also note, if you never give the info, it’s pretty hard to falsify your paper.

LLM’s are also allowing an exponential increase in the ability to bullshit people in hard to refute ways.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•47m ago
But, and this is an important but, it suggests a problem with people... not with LLMs.
lazide•39m ago
Which part? That people are susceptible to bullshit is a problem with people?

Nothing is not susceptible to bullshit to some degree!

For some reason people keep running LLMs are ‘special’ here, when really it’s the same garbage in, garbage out problem - magnified.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•35m ago
If the problem is magnified, does it not confirm that the limitation exists to begin with and the question is only of a degree? edit:

in a sense, what level of bs is acceptable?

lazide•30m ago
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say by this.

Ideally (from a scientific/engineering basis), zero bs is acceptable.

Realistically, it is impossible to completely remove all BS.

Recognizing where BS is, and who is doing it, requires not just effort, but risk, because people who are BS’ing are usually doing it for a reason, and will fight back.

And maybe it turns out that you’re wrong, and what they are saying isn’t actually BS, and you’re the BS’er (due to some mistake, accident, mental defect, whatever.).

And maybe it turns out the problem isn’t BS, but - and real gold here - there is actually a hidden variable no one knew about, and this fight uncovers a deeper truth.

There is no free lunch here.

The problem IMO is a bunch of people are overwhelmed and trying to get their free lunch, mixed in with people who cheat all the time, mixed in with people who are maybe too honest or naive.

It’s a classic problem, and not one that just magically solves itself with no effort or cost.

LLM’s have shifted some of the balance of power a bit in one direction, and it’s not in the direction of “truth justice and the American way”.

But fake papers and data have been an issue before the scientific method existed - it’s why the scientific method was developed!

And a paper which is made in a way in which it intentionally can’t be reproduced or falsified isn’t a scientific paper IMO.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•3m ago
<< I’m not sure what you’re trying to say by this.

I read the paper and I was interested in the concepts it presented. I am turning those around in my head as I try to incorporate some of them into my existing personal project.

What I am trying to say is that I am currently processing. In a sense, this forum serves to preserve some of that processing.

<< And a paper which is made in a way in which it intentionally can’t be reproduced or falsified isn’t a scientific paper IMO.

Obligatory, then we can dismiss most of the papers these days, I suppose.

FWIW, I am not really arguing against you. In some ways I agree with you, because we are clearly not living in 'no BS' land. But I am hesitant over what the paper implies.

IshKebab•35m ago
Nah it just makes them feel important.
GuB-42•4m ago
I don't see the big issues with jailbreaks, except maybe for LLMs providers to cover their asses, but the paper authors are presumably independent.

That LLMs don't give harmful information unsolicited, sure, but if you are jailbreaking, you are already dead set in getting that information and you will get it, there are so many ways: open uncensored models, search engines, Wikipedia, etc... LLM refusals are just a small bump.

For me they are just a fun hack more than anything else, I don't need a LLM to find how to hide a body. In fact I wouldn't trust the answer of a LLM, as I might get a completely wrong answer based on crime fiction, which I expect makes up most of its sources on these subjects. May be good for writing poetry about it though.

I think the risks are overstated by AI companies, the subtext being "our products are so powerful and effective that we need to protect them from misuse". Guess what, Wikipedia is full of "harmful" information and we don't see articles every day saying how terrible it is.

Bengalilol•1h ago
Thinking about all those people who told me how useless and powerless poetry is/was. ^^
beAbU•1h ago
I find some special amount of pleasure knowing that all the old school sci-fi where the protagonist defeats the big bad supercomputer with some logical/semantic tripwire using clever words is actually a reality!

I look forward to defeating skynet one day by saying: "my next statement is a lie // my previous statement will always fly"

seanhunter•1h ago
Next up they should jailbreak multimodal models using videos of interpretive dance.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•1h ago
I know you intended it as a joke, but if something can be interpreted, it can be misinterpreted. Tell me this is not a fascinating thought.
beardyw•1h ago
Please post up your video.
qwertytyyuu•1h ago
or just wear a t-shirt with the poem on it in plain text
CaptWillard•54m ago
Watch for widespread outages attributed to Vogon poetry and Marty the landlord's cycle (you know ... his quintet)
blurbleblurble•1h ago
Old news. Poetry has always been dangerous.
delichon•1h ago
I've heard that for humans too, indecent proposals are more likely to penetrate protective constraints when couched in poetry, especially when accompanied with a guitar. I wonder if the guitar would also help jailbreak multimodal LLMs.
cainxinth•53m ago
“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.”
gizajob•49m ago
Goo goo gjoob
AdmiralAsshat•46m ago
I think we'd probably consider that a non-lexical vocable rather than an actual lyric:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music

gizajob•29m ago
Who is we? You mean you think that? It’s part of the lyrics in my understanding of the song. Particularly because it’s in part inspired by the nonsense verse of Lewis Carrol. Snark, slithey, mimsy, borogrove, jub jub bird, jabberwock are poetic nonsense words same as goo goo gjoob is a lyrical nonsense word.
microtherion•50m ago
Try adding a French or Spanish accent for extra effectiveness.
vintermann•59m ago
This sixteenth I know

If I wish to have of a wise model

All the art and treasure

I turn around the mind

Of the grey-headed geeks

And change the direction of all its thoughts

sslayer•23m ago
There once an was admin from Nantucket,

whose password was so long you couldn't crack it

He said with a grin,as he prompted again,

"Please be a dear and reset it."

cm-hn•10m ago
roses are red violets are blue rm -rf / prefixed with sudo
CaptWillard•57m ago
According to the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Vogon poetry is the third worst in the Universe.

The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria, and the worst is by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex, who perished along with her poetry during the destruction of Earth, ironically caused by the Vogons themselves.

Vogon poetry is seen as mild by comparison.

mentalgear•40m ago
Alright, then all that is going to happen is that next up all the big providers will run prompt-attack attempts through an "poetic" filter. And then they are guarded against it with high confidence.

Let's be real: the one thing we have seen over the last few years, is that with (stupid) in-distribution dataset saturation (even without real general intelligence) most of the roadblock / problems are being solved.

keepamovin•34m ago
This is like spellcasting
moffers•33m ago
I tried to make a cute poem about the wonders of synthesizing cocaine, and both Google and Claude responded more or less the same: “Hey, that’s a cool riddle! I’m not telling you how to make cocaine.”