Use of LLMs for Illicit Purposes: Threats, Prevention Measures, and Vulnerabilities

Understand

Spurred by the recent rapid increase in the development and distribution of large language models (LLMs) across industry and academia, much recent work has drawn attention to safety- and security-related threats and vulnerabilities of LLMs, including in the context of potentially criminal activities.

• Specifically, it has been shown that LLMs can be misused for fraud, impersonation, and the generation of malware; while other authors have considered the more general problem of AI alignment.
• It is important that developers and practitioners alike are aware of security-related problems with such models.
• In this paper, we provide an overview of existing - predominantly scientific - efforts on identifying and mitigating threats and vulnerabilities arising from LLMs.