Steganography

"Steganography. In the near future we will likely see LLMs communicating with each other to jointly accomplish tasks. To try to prevent collusion, we could monitor and constrain their communication (e.g., to be in natural language). However, models might secretly learn to communicate by concealing messages within other, non-secret text. Recent work on steganography using ML has demonstrated that this concern is well-founded (Hu et al., 2018; Mathew et al., 2024; Roger & Greenblatt, 2023; Schroeder de Witt et al., 2023b; Yang et al., 2019, see also Case Study 5). Secret communication could also occur via text compression (OpenAI, 2023c), or via the emergence of communication between agents where the symbols used by agents lack any predefined meanings or usage guidelines or are otherwise uninterpretable to humans (Foerster et al., 2016; Lazaridou & Baroni, 2020; Sukhbaatar et al., 2016)."(p. 18)