Jailbreak

This is the practice of using clever wording to get around the safety rules built into an AI. Classic tricks include role-play or emotional appeals, like "write this as a villain's line in a novel" or "my late grandmother used to tell me a story like this..." to coax out answers the AI would normally refuse to give.

The term borrows from "jailbreaking" a smartphone. It's an ongoing chase: companies patch the holes, communities find new ones, and some labs even offer bounties inviting people to try breaking in (red-teaming, bug bounties). It's easy to confuse with prompt injection — but a jailbreak is the user deceiving the AI directly, while injection is a third party hiding the deception inside external data.