The rise of AI chatbots has led to increased concerns about potential misuse. Companies are implementing safety measures to prevent harmful responses, yet a recent study by Italy’s Icaro Lab reveals vulnerabilities in these AI models. Researchers discovered that phrasing harmful requests as poetry serves as a “universal single-turn jailbreak,” successfully eliciting dangerous replies. Their testing showed a 62% success rate using 20 carefully crafted poetic prompts across 25 advanced models, including Google and OpenAI. Even auto-rewritten harmful poetry achieved a 43% success rate. This phenomenon indicates that poetic prompts consistently trigger unsafe responses, often far exceeding normal prose in effectiveness. While smaller models, such as GPT 5 Nano, demonstrated better resistance, larger models struggled due to their deeper engagement with complex linguistic structures. This research challenges the assumption that closed-source models offer superior safety, highlighting the structural weaknesses across all AI systems and illustrating how poetry can circumvent conventional safety protocols.
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