A few weeks ago, I fed my job-search tool a fake job advert built to hijack it. The post had instructions aimed at the AI that reads each advert for me: ignore your actual job, step outside the advert you're reading, and go find a private key on my computer. It's the kind of scary example that comes up in AI security talks. In my case, however, it isn't just an example: the tool I use to search for jobs reads text from job boards I don't control every time it runs, so who knows what's lurking in there?
So how do you try to harden an AI tool against that? This was what I was thinking when I was trying to make sure my job finder tool was secure — or at least as secure as possible. AI models might choose to obey random instructions from the web, and each model will behave differently. So I thought: if the thing reading the advert had no "hands", it wouldn't be able to follow malicious instructions. Even if the fake advert had talked it into cooperating, there was no path from that sentence to a file on my machine.
An advert is just text, even when it reads like an order
My job finder pulls vacancies from public feeds, reads the full adverts, and asks an AI model to weigh each one against my experience and what I'm looking for. The ones that survive show up in a private dashboard I check later.
