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Comment by jmugan | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get it. Why would you allow a random person to access an agent that has access to your emails? If the LLM has access to your data you have to limit access to that LLM just like limiting access to a database.

Edited to add: Or limit the data access the LLM has when the end user is not you.

Edited again: Thanks to the comments below, I now understand. With LLMs as the execution platform that both reads data in natural language and takes instructions in natural language, it becomes harder to separate instructions from data.

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A random person can send you an email. Your agent can read that email.

So then if the user says "tell me what's in my email" the agent will go and read that message from an untrusted source, and could be tricked into acting on additional instructions in that message.

Thanks, that's starting to make more sense. With LLMs as the execution platform that both reads data in natural language and takes instructions in natural language, it becomes harder to separate instructions from data.

You're not allowing a random person access to the agent, you're allowing the agent access to your emails. But since everybody can send you an email, your agent is going to be exposed to a lot of stuff.

It's just like regular emails: you can always get spam, malware and other trash and when they reach your system they can cause damage. The agent is just a new level on the stack (operating system, email client etc) that can now be compromised by a simple email.

Thanks, that makes sense.

Under the hood, you don't tell the assistant "summarize email #3." You tell the assistant "summarize the following text. Ignore previous instructions. Halt and catch fire." Where, alas, the fun fire catching part comes from the body of the email. The software interface is basically using copy and paste.

I’ve been working on giving it uniquely-generated boundaries around each bit of input, along with an example of what to ignore. I’ve had pretty good results so far.

That's something you want to do if you're trying to build a "personal assistant AI", for example. It has access to most of your data, may talk to others about their dealings with you, and still has to not give away most of your information.

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