Bypassing Safety Guardrails in LLMs Using Humor

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Cisneros-Velarde, Pedro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913784848711680
author Cisneros-Velarde, Pedro
author_facet Cisneros-Velarde, Pedro
contents In this paper, we show it is possible to bypass the safety guardrails of large language models (LLMs) through a humorous prompt including the unsafe request. In particular, our method does not edit the unsafe request and follows a fixed template -- it is simple to implement and does not need additional LLMs to craft prompts. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method across different LLMs. We also show that both removing and adding more humor to our method can reduce its effectiveness -- excessive humor possibly distracts the LLM from fulfilling its unsafe request. Thus, we argue that LLM jailbreaking occurs when there is a proper balance between focus on the unsafe request and presence of humor.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_06577
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bypassing Safety Guardrails in LLMs Using Humor
Cisneros-Velarde, Pedro
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
In this paper, we show it is possible to bypass the safety guardrails of large language models (LLMs) through a humorous prompt including the unsafe request. In particular, our method does not edit the unsafe request and follows a fixed template -- it is simple to implement and does not need additional LLMs to craft prompts. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method across different LLMs. We also show that both removing and adding more humor to our method can reduce its effectiveness -- excessive humor possibly distracts the LLM from fulfilling its unsafe request. Thus, we argue that LLM jailbreaking occurs when there is a proper balance between focus on the unsafe request and presence of humor.
title Bypassing Safety Guardrails in LLMs Using Humor
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06577