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Comment by MPSimmons | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, this is the kind of steganography that is meant for humans to read. There's no reason a computer couldn't encode meaningful information in the least significant bytes of every 16th pixel or something like that.

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The article is about what LLMs can do when generating SVG images, not bitmaps. I think the reason for that is that LLMs can generate the XML text for SVG directly. The implications for AI safety are different, because there might not be any code involved that we can examine. So LLMs could start exchanging hidden messages without humans knowing about it.

But now that I think about it that way, it would probably be more interesting to see what kind of steganography LLMs would use in ordinary text. There's no reason to involve images.

> The implications for AI safety are different

Like when your printer adds secret massages for cops? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

> Like when your printer adds secret massages for cops

That's not going to have a happy ending...

I've assumed this is why printers are so hell-bent on having internet connectivity: a link between the printed ID and IP address.

>The article is about what LLMs can do when generating SVG images, not bitmaps.

Aha... that is an interesting distinction. I did not think of that. Alongside this, it means you could resize the image and not lose the information.

> to see what kind of steganography LLMs would use in ordinary text.

Isn't the "watermarking" of LLM text already an example?

That watermarking is not something the LLM chooses to add, neither through training nor in response to any prompt. This article is about the choices LLMs make when explicitly told to hide messages.

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