{"id":178,"date":"2026-05-01T00:01:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T00:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/?p=178"},"modified":"2026-05-05T19:07:49","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T19:07:49","slug":"ignore-all-previous-instructions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/hackacon\/2026\/05\/01\/ignore-all-previous-instructions\/","title":{"rendered":"Ignore all previous instructions\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Historically, when it came to deciding whether we were interacting with a human or a computer, we had the Turing Test. Created in 1949 by Alan Turing himself, there was once even a prize for whoever could create an artificial conversational entity (ACE) capable of successfully duping enough of the judges into believing that they were chatting with a real person.<\/p>\n

As fate would have it, interest in the Turing Test ebbed, the prize became defunct, and feverish reports on Star Trek-style computers that could interact with us just like humans dwindled.<\/p>\n

Seventy-five years later, however, the problem migrated off the pages of far-fetched sci-fi novels and it has now flooded across most, if not all social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, TikTok, and even – or perhaps especially – LinkedIn are now drowning under AI-generated content from accounts posing as humans, turning what used to be an after-dinner academic conversation piece into an irritating continual Bot or Not?<\/a> sanity check.<\/p>\n

But one thing has evolved: instead of the Turing Test, we now have\u2026 the Cupcake Test.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Where judges might once have asked Turing Test contenders about their family, hobbies, or travel plans, the Cupcake Test is form of prompt injection \u2013 an attack where a user issues a strange instruction designed to reveal that the \u201cperson\u201d they are interacting with is, in fact, a conversational AI agent. In the inevitable arms race that has ensued, some chatbots are now smart enough to disregard the “disregard” command, or to even joke about attempted prompt injections, but not all, and that brings us to March 2026.<\/p>\n

Hi, Henry!<\/h1>\n

Up to present, the majority of AI generated content has been in text format, but with the rapid advancements in synthetic speech, we are now seeing AI-powered scam calls, and a viral video posted on TikTok and Instagram by Lavizrap13 demonstrates that prompt injections for verbal scam attempts can be just as effective \u2013 at least for now.<\/p>\n

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