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Comment by bsuvc | Hacker News Reader

Is "red team" a verb now? I barely even know what that means. I assume it stems from the "red team" being bad guys in video games, but am not certain. Even with that assumption, I'm not quite sure what "red team into toxicity" really means other than being a scary sounding headline.

EDIT: The title was renamed since I made this comment. My point, I think, is still valid though. The original title was something like "LLMs can be red teamed into toxicity" but I don't recall exactly

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_team Is the first hit in google

It’s an information security “penetration testing” reference. Red Team is trying to “attack” some other Blue Team.

The meaning seems to be that an LLM can have certain vulnerabilities exploited (“red teamed”) such that it exhibits behaviors that its training algorithm had intended it to avoid.

Admittedly I didn't know what it was either, but had a ChatGPT window open, so I asked it, first, what a "red team" is.

In the context of cybersecurity, a "red team" refers to a group of individuals who simulate attacks or test the security of a system to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

Then, is it a verb?

In the given headline, "red team" functions as a verb phrase. Specifically, "red team" is used as a verb in the infinitive form. The phrase "to automatically red team" indicates the action of assessing or evaluating LLMs for toxicity using automated methods.

I've heard it as a verb for sure -- "I've been red-teaming at X Corp for a while now"

But in a broader sense it's oppositional actions taken against a "good guy", usually with the goal of improving the good guy aka the Blue Team.

Think Starcraft or other video games where you have a little radar in the corner; good guys are blue, bad guys are red.

“A red team is an independent security team that poses as an attacker to gauge vulnerabilities and risk within a controlled environment.”

Is what I’m working off of

That doesn't help much! What does "red team" mean as a verb in this case?

I don’t like it, but the usage is “[attack as a] red team”, in other words “act in an adversarial manner”.

To do the work of a red team. To try to break something in order to identify its flaws.

It’s very common in English for nouns to become verbs that mean the thing you use the noun to do.

I don’t know if that’s historically common but I sometimes verb like this when I’m too lazy to think of phrases like “think of phrases”. (Here’s to hoping that makes any sense.)

English verbs nouns all the time

In that context, the title still makes no sense.

You sometime see it as "red teaming" or "red team'ed" which might be more grammatically correct?

Regardless, "to red team something" really is a common saying in the security industry. It's the corpo/whitehat version of "to pwn".

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