Ethical safeguards and vulnerabilities in large language models

This study examines the ethical safeguards and vulnerabilities of six large language models: Claude, Mistral, ChatGPT, Llama2, Perplexity, and Poe.Through targeted prompts exploring malware creation, phishing attempts, and social engineering scenarios, we evaluated their susceptibility to misuse and their ability to enforce ethical guidelines.With some jailbreaking attempts we see how manipulation could bypass safety mechanisms, showing potential for large language models to facilitate malicious actions or just gain more knowledge in general about it.From testing it seemed like Claude demonstrated the most resilience.The results show a continuous need to improve the safety features of AI as with enough time and effort, there are possibilities to use them for malicious intent.Urging AI developers and experts mitigate those risks by implementing stronger ethical safeguards to counteract the different manipulation techniques.

Publication Details

Journal
Issues in Information Systems
Published
2025-01-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48009/3_iis_2025_2025_125
Primary Topic
Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Ethical safeguards and vulnerabilities in large language models

Issues in Information Systems
Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
article

Ethical safeguards and vulnerabilities in large language models

article en

Abstract

This study examines the ethical safeguards and vulnerabilities of six large language models: Claude, Mistral, ChatGPT, Llama2, Perplexity, and Poe.Through targeted prompts exploring malware creation, phishing attempts, and social engineering scenarios, we evaluated their susceptibility to misuse and their ability to enforce ethical guidelines.With some jailbreaking attempts we see how manipulation could bypass safety mechanisms, showing potential for large language models to facilitate malicious actions or just gain more knowledge in general about it.From testing it seemed like Claude demonstrated the most resilience.The results show a continuous need to improve the safety features of AI as with enough time and effort, there are possibilities to use them for malicious intent.Urging AI developers and experts mitigate those risks by implementing stronger ethical safeguards to counteract the different manipulation techniques.

Issues in Information Systems
Openalex Percentile: Top 75%
Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
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