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this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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Programming
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The person who coined the term "prompt injection" has the same gripe, because the original term genuinely did mean an attack using untrusted user input, a la SQL injection. But it's been conflated with jailbreak attacks in general, muddying the term.
Example of a bona fide prompt injection: white text in the background of a resume PDF, attacking a job application portal that uses LLMs to filter applicants. No privilege escalation is involved to give the candidate top marks on their resume screening.
Whereas a non-prompt injection jailbreak would be bypassing a safety filter, such as how Morse code might get past the filter and allow a user to request other people's cryptocurrency be transfered away. This is more akin to finding a poorly-secured, public facing API and then exploiting it.
By that definition this is a prompt injection then, its adding a "hidden" prompt that is obscured from the human in order to change the behavior of the AI to do something else malicious.
Finding a poorly-secured public facing API is exactly how injections work, whether it's SQL or prompts. If I put SQL commands in a username field and it works, it's still an SQL injection even if it's just developer incompetence.
The difference between that and prompt injection is that unfiltered LLM inputs are basically the standard at the moment, so it takes next to no effort.
Plus I think the Morse code example is far more clever and exploits the LLM directly, whereas the white text trick has been around long before widespread LLMs.