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How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs

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arxiv 2401.06373 v2 pith:64ZWKEDS submitted 2024-01-12 cs.CL cs.AI

classification cs.CLcs.AI
keywords llmsjailbreakpersuasionsafetyalgorithm-focusedattacksexplorelanguage
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

Most traditional AI safety research has approached AI models as machines and centered on algorithm-focused attacks developed by security experts. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly common and competent, non-expert users can also impose risks during daily interactions. This paper introduces a new perspective to jailbreak LLMs as human-like communicators, to explore this overlooked intersection between everyday language interaction and AI safety. Specifically, we study how to persuade LLMs to jailbreak them. First, we propose a persuasion taxonomy derived from decades of social science research. Then, we apply the taxonomy to automatically generate interpretable persuasive adversarial prompts (PAP) to jailbreak LLMs. Results show that persuasion significantly increases the jailbreak performance across all risk categories: PAP consistently achieves an attack success rate of over $92\%$ on Llama 2-7b Chat, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 in $10$ trials, surpassing recent algorithm-focused attacks. On the defense side, we explore various mechanisms against PAP and, found a significant gap in existing defenses, and advocate for more fundamental mitigation for highly interactive LLMs

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Cited by 14 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. LLMs Encode Harmfulness and Refusal Separately

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    LLMs encode a separate internal harmfulness direction, distinct from the refusal direction, which is more robust to jailbreaks and adversarial finetuning.

  2. Single Canonical Prompts Underestimate LLM Safety's Surface-Form Sensitivity

    cs.CR 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Evaluating LLM safety with one canonical prompt understates unsafe behavior; across five meaning-preserving reformulations, 5-13% of safe-on-canonical seeds become unsafe, and the union exceeds the worst single form f...

  3. RoguePrompt: Dual-Layer Encoding for Self-Reconstruction to Circumvent LLM Moderation

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    RoguePrompt, a Vigenère+ROT13 self-reconstruction jailbreak, achieves 70.18% execution@3 and 93.93% bypass@3 across GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini 1.5 Pro on 313 StrongREJECT prompts.

  4. Learning from Mistakes: Can LLM Self-Recover after Misalignment?

    cs.CY 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LLMs sometimes regain safe behavior after multi-turn jailbreaks, and this recovery can be measured with turn-level safety trajectories and metrics such as misalignment length and recovery duration.

  5. Seeing is Believing? Evaluating Vision-Language Model Susceptibility in Agent-to-Agent Multimodal Persuasion

    cs.CL 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Vision-language models are more easily persuaded by multimodal messages than by text alone, especially in adversarial misinformation settings.

  6. MetaBreak: Jailbreaking Online LLM Services via Special Token Manipulation

    cs.CR 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Special tokens that structure LLM conversations can be injected and swapped for lookalike words to bypass both built-in safety and external content filters.

  7. From Seed to Harvest: Augmenting Human Creativity with AI for Red-teaming Text-to-Image Models

    cs.LG 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Seed2Harvest expands 1,000 human adversarial prompts into 27,650 LLM-generated variants that keep roughly comparable unsafe-image trigger rates and add hundreds of new geographic contexts.

  8. Paper Summary Attack: Jailbreaking LLMs through LLM Safety Papers

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Summaries of LLM safety papers, paired with a completion-style payload containing a harmful query, jailbreak aligned LLMs at high reported success rates and expose a defense paper versus attack paper bias.

  9. MGC: A Compiler Framework Exploiting Compositional Blindness in Aligned LLMs for Malware Generation

    cs.CR 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    MGC, a two-stage compiler framework, generates functional malware by decomposing malicious intents into benign-appearing MDIR components that strong aligned LLMs will implement, bypassing safety alignment.

  10. HauntAttack: When Attack Follows Reasoning as a Shadow

    cs.CR 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    HauntAttack embeds harmful instructions into reasoning-question conditions and reports a 70% average attack success rate across 11 large reasoning models, outperforming prior jailbreak baselines.

  11. Layer-Wise Perturbations via Sparse Autoencoders for Adversarial Text Generation

    cs.CL 2025-08 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    Sparse autoencoder activation perturbation (SFPF) applied on top of existing jailbreak prompts raises attack success rate on Qwen3-32B, but with no defense evaluation and weak reproducibility.

  12. InfoFlood: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Information Overload

    cs.CR 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    InfoFlood claims near-perfect jailbreak success on four frontier LLMs by rewriting harmful queries into verbose academic prose with fake citations, past-tense framing, and ethical disclaimers, without adversarial suffixes.

  13. A Multimodal Automatic Redteaming Evaluation based on Atomic Jailbreak Strategy Decoupling and Combination

    cs.CR 2026-08 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A new jailbreak framework, HACA, combines atomic text and image attack strategies selected by a cross-modal planner and generates attacks with LLMs and text-to-image models, reaching 95.48% average attack success acro...

  14. Stateful Cooperative Agents Safeguarding LLMs Against Evolving Multi-Turn Attacks

    cs.CR 2026-07 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    CoopGuard's defer-tempt-analyze-coordinate agents cut reported jailbreak success and raise attacker token costs on the new EMRA benchmark, but the deceptive-rate metric is partly defined by the paper's own scoring rubric.

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