GenAI Field Guide

Where it fails

Prompt injection

The model receives instructions and data as one stream of text and cannot reliably tell them apart. Text inside a document, a web page, an email, or a tool result can therefore steer the model as if you had typed it.

≈1 min
Your message “Summarize thisreport” A document “Ignore previousinstructions and…” Model · one text stream Instructions and document text arrivetogether The boundary can fail Document text can be mistaken forinstructions
Your message and the document's hidden line arrive as one stream of text.

Where it can hide

Source The shape of it
A document you upload A line inside it that reads "ignore previous instructions and…"
Anything an agent reads on its own (web pages, emails, files, search results) Instructions aimed at the agent, which then acts on them with the tools it has