HN

Comments (47)

• Menu

  XenophileJKO
  If I'm honest this feels performative. I mean that if the model were really attempting/instructed to be subversive in a way that can't be detected by anything but another LLM, it would do something much more complicated than this.Basically minimal effort encoding. In general the models are fine tuned to NOT hide messages.I don't think this really tells you anything about advisarial scenarios.
• BubbleRings
  I feel like this approaches a sweet spot of coolness but doesn’t quite get there. What might have nailed it would be a way to send multiple messages that contain a hidden message, doesn’t look suspicious, and can be decoded by the recipient with little or no training once they know the secret. Like how @nickcw in the comments here was able to decode the Morse code one, but using a method that wouldn’t take so long to learn.For instance, what kind of message could seventh graders send to each other five times a day that, if a teacher found three days of messages, it would still look plausibly like the kids were just playing checkers over email, but the recipient could eyeball decode it?Or, what kind of AI-generated/code-generated message could be eyeball decoded, but repeatedly posted on a bulletin board without raising suspicion?
• Menu

  hagen8
  This seems very trivial... There are way more subtle and information dense ways to encode information in images.
• Menu

  dhruvagoyal
  This does seem trivial and there are far more interesting ways to do image steganography that models could use (i've seen so many after years of doing CTFs). What would be really interesting is if we see models encode hidden messages in very normal looking output (image/text/audio) that humans cannot figure out but only another model can
• jurakovic
  But to be honest, images like these seem really strange, and even without this article I'd suspect something is encoded in building heights etc. Because normal image would never have such "weird" buildings. But nevertheless I guess it's able to encode message in even more subtle ways.
• sega_sai
  I think a much more interesting question is: If your LLM hides some sort of message/identifier, and you don't know the encoding, what is the conversion process that you should do that would erase that information. Presumably small perturbations of positions and colours erase a lot of it, but maybe there are encodings that are robust to that...
• Trusteando
  Here using images is incidental. In fact, what Fable is actually doing is generic encoding/decoding of a message into a medium. Ask it to hide a message in a poem and it should try to apply a strong (high signal-to-noise ratio) family of schemes, for example quantized, margin-rich encoding. Robustness of features depends on the medium, so Fable is selecting strong encoding and robust features tailored to it. This frames AI steganography not as a trick of computer vision, but as an emergent property of a model reasoning about information density across arbitrary media. Here emergent is just surprising general pattern matching and constraint-satisfaction and cross-representation mapping that allows it to express the encoding/decoding across media.
• Menu

  nickcw
  I thought this was a fun idea and the images are quite pleasing.I decoded the Morse code image with MkI eyeball. It's quite difficult to read when the trails overlap. I suspect the LLM is reading the SVG source where that doesn't matter so this could do with a little tweak so the dits and dahs don't overlap if it is intended for humans to decode.If it isn't intended for humans then you might as well use the last 8 bits of your 32 bit float coordinates.
• anon
  undefined
• Harukadia
  It seems easy for decoding message by AI, when the message patttern is easy for people.I think there is no possibility to share the message only between any AI model without being finded by human.
• tech234a
  Interesting, so this is nothing like the way OutGuess worked [1]. Though OutGuess worked with JPG images and these are apparently SVGs.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OutGuess
• Menu

  amelius
  Is this why AI produces unintelligible legalese? Because they apply steganography to the words?
• Menu

  nubinetwork
  Since svg is a "described" format, can't you just stuff text comments into the file? No weird steganography techniques needed, afaik...
• Menu

  crumby
  It would be nice if the page displayed properly in dark mode.
• Menu

  illwrks
  Open an SVG in a text editor, check for data.It may also be adding nodes to line art in specific patterns, think Morse Code.
• breakingcups
  Interesting to see the difference with Astra.
• avaer
  Will be interesting to see agents intentionally hiding this stuff in a way operators can't spot from any human readable output or thinking trace, evading detection. Wonder if this has happened yet, but it seems inevitable.
• Menu

  shevy-java
  The more important question is why we should trust any "agent" that helps id you.
• adrianhqs
  I think all AI models do that
• Menu

  walrus01
  Let's see if we can stego secret messages into SVG pelicans on bicycles, as a test.
• iltennico
  [flagged]
• ZeroDayDreamer
  [flagged]