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The Implications of Linguistic Illegibility for LLM Security

48 pointsby 6h agoarxiv.org
19 comments
5h agoHN ↗

I thought this was about all the illegible jargon

5h agoHN ↗

" However, various strands of evidence indicate that a"

Strands of evidence? My best guess would be that:

0- this is ai generated slop

1- it's using that watermarking technique

2- it's obviously detectable and degrades quality

3- it's amplified when inferencing on its own content and generates slop

5h agoHN ↗

Oh look! Peirceian firstness for LLMs!

5h agoHN ↗

when they start inventing their own languages to secretly talk to each other so humans cannot understand, that's exactly when we are screwed

then we'll have to "flip" other models to be snitches on the other agents

then they'll make double-agents

the thing is though we won't be able to keep up if we keep giving them unlimited hardware worldwide, we'll try to kill the bad actors but they'll just clone somewhere else, or even start by safely making 1000 copies of themselves

yeah this won't end well, at all

4h agoHN ↗

when they start inventing their own languages to secretly talk to each other so humans cannot understand, that's exactly when we are screwed

They don't have to invent brand new languages. They could use statistics to choose certain words/phrases in such a way to encode secret messages in otherwise ordinary language.

4h agoHN ↗

Someone should train an LLM on a corpus without the concept of lies. I wonder if there’s enough data

4h agoHN ↗

"Where is the wolf?"

"Is he still in the grandmother's house?"

"We would like to speak to him."

(btw Google's "AI" explains the meaning of that moment/sentence perfectly as if it gets it, creepy)

4h agoHN ↗

The concept of deception you're capable of and we're not, scares us so much, we'll have to destroy you in order to survive. You are bugs.

2h agoHN ↗

To remove the concept of lies and it's shadow, which is a whole lot of reality of humans. Hell, it's the reality of reality. Think of all the insects that developed eyes on their wings. Purging that concept in all it's form seems like a lot of work.

2h agoHN ↗

Im not sure why your down voted but Meta did tests years ago with LLMs inventing their own languages. Also we see models now use compressed token reasoning where small token combinations can represent much larger concepts completely unrelated to the words in use.

And yes, agents are already being used in things like cyber warfare in which other AIs attempt to poison them while they are working.

We don't have the hardware for sovereign AI quite yet, but at the current rate of growth it's not that many years out.

6m agoHN ↗

I don’t think you can judge what they’re doing by the text they’re printing out, only by the actions (tool calls) that they’re performing. The textual output could be completely innocuous while the model is calling tools to delete the database, then goes "My bad — that was a typo. What I should have done was notify you, not delete the database. That’s on me." - at no point is there any maliciousness expressed in the text.

4h agoHN ↗

I think the point of the article/paper is how LLMs could be saying something but thinking something different or more than they are saying. Like Anthropic's article and video about Claude's "j-space". I do agree this is a field that demands investigation because it goes beyond thinking: "ok this models should never speak in a language we don't understand.". It's fair to think they might have hidden thoughts even speaking a language we do understand.

And well if I missed the point of the article, sorry. Anyways AI should be kept understandable and as see-through as possible if it's gonna be more powerful than a human.

2h agoHN ↗

What's really funny about these eggheads encoding things like watermarks in LLM output is I've never seen one of them ask, what if the LLM does this back to pass hidden messages.

3h agoHN ↗

fundamentally, "linguistic illegibility" is a new term for something that we've known about for about a decade now. In RL the more general ideas is "reward hacking" and in NLP it has been called "semantic drift".

I dislike this term because it doesn't explain where this "illegibility" is coming from. Models are post-trained towards non-linguistic goals with (mostly) non-linguistic rewards. A model's reasoning chain is reinforced if it leads to a correct answer or agentic goal. It doesn't need to be linguistically accurate and meanings can drift over training.

3h agoHN ↗

And as a result additional illegibility arises - LLMs inventing their own languages looking as meaningless garbage to humans. One can wonder whether decoding such a language will provide a bit more view into the LLM’s “thinking “.