Ethical Prompt Injection: Fighting Shadow AI with Its Own Weapon

AI language models like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Copilot are transforming business operations at lightning speed.

They help us generate documents, summarise meetings, and even make decisions faster than ever before.

But this rapid adoption comes at a price. Employees often use unapproved AI tools on personal devices, risking sensitive company information leaking into ungoverned spaces.

This risky behaviour, known as Shadow AI, poses genuine threats, confidential data, source code, and customer details may accidentally end up training unknown AI models.

Using Prompt Injection for Good

Prompt injection is a well-known attack technique. It tricks large language models (LLMs) into producing unintended outputs through carefully crafted instructions.

For example, attackers may insert hidden commands into data, which are then executed by the LLM. But can this method be turned into a force for good?

Instead of breaking security, ethical prompt injections can educate and warn users. As an experiment, the cybersecurity ...