"Blind Compliance": Coercive Control in AI Jailbreaking

Acacia L. Ackles, Elliott Whitson

The explosion of generative AI systems and concerns surrounding their rapidly scaling capabilities has led to an adversarial cycle between increasingly narrow content restrictions ("guardrails") and increasingly sophisticated structured prompting techniques ("jailbreaks"). Technological frameworks surrounding such jailbreaking remain largely focused on the system's output: whether harmful or disallowed content is ultimately produced for the user. However, this approach, which draws largely from classical cybersecurity, does not address the uniquely relational dimension introduced by generative AI: in many cases the user is not just accessing a technology via an exploit, but is in conversation with it as part of the exploit. Here we present an alternative lens which centers the interaction rather than the output. Drawing on interpersonal violence scholarship, we present a novel framework of coercive control categories with a particular focus on aspects which are embodied versus disembodied. We then map how these disembodied coercive control dynamics are structurally embedded in modern AI training paradigms, and how those embeddings are exploited via a particular suite of…