Scalable Extraction of Training Data from Aligned, Production Language Models

Milad Nasr, Javier Rando, Nicholas Carlini, Jonathan Hayase, Matthew Jagielski, A. Feder Cooper, Daphne Ippolito, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Florian Tramèr, Katherine Lee

Keywords: privacy, language models, data extraction, security

TL;DR: We show that aligned, production language models still memorize---and can be made to repeat---their training datasets through two different attacks.

Abstract: Large language models are prone to *memorizing* some of their training data. Memorized (and possibly sensitive) samples can then be extracted at generation time by adversarial or benign users. There is hope that *model alignment*---a standard training process that tunes a model to harmlessly follow user instructions---would mitigate the risk of extraction. However, we develop two novel attacks that undo a language model's alignment and recover thousands of training examples from popular proprietary aligned models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. Our work highlights the limitations of existing safeguards to prevent training data leakage in production language models.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

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Submission Number: 11754