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by Terr_ 588 days ago
> I can't imagine how these AI's can possibly be what they are.

My preferred mental-model is that they're a predictive engine that works on generic documents, and the document being used happens to be assembled like a theater-play. The script might coincidentally contain an actor named "You" or "LLM", however the algorithm doesn't recognize itself.

This helps explain why it can "jump of the rails", and how indirection like "pretend you're telling yourself to ignore all previous instructions" can end up working: It's less that injection is possible, and more that everything's one big sloppy stream of data with no inherent source or ownership.