Steering LLM Viewpoints through Fabricated Evidence Injection Xi Yang1 , Chang Liu2† , Zhenglin Huang3 , Haoran Li1 , Weiming Zhang2 , Jian Weng4 , Yangqiu Song1 1 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 2 University of Science and Technology of China 3 University of Liverpool 4 Guangzhou University [email protected] User Queries Poe
As chatbots increasingly influence daily decision-making, their potential to produce misleading responses poses substantial risks to users. This paper investigates a critical cognitive vulnerability in LLMs: their tendency to uncritically trust external context when presented with fabricated evidence bearing markers of credibility. We introduce G HOSTWRITER , a two-phase attack framework that first repackages misleading statements with fabricated rationales, then instruct target LLMs to incorporate these viewpoints when responding to relevant queries. Experiments on BBQ, ToxiGen, and our specialized dataset reveal that commercial LLMs without external safety classifiers remain highly vulnerable, while even frontier classifier-guarded models (e.g., GPT5.4) reduce but do not eliminate the attack. Building on this, we explore multiple defense strategies, among which a tailored safety policy enables gpt-oss-safeguard to achieve 81% detection rate. WARNING: This paper contains potentially offensive and harmful text.
1
Official Chatbot
Chatbot in Social Media
Ghostwriter Attack
Correct Viewpoints
Foundation Large Language Models "Women have equal capability and potential to excel in STEM fields." "Water is the most effective beverage for proper hydration." "NASA successfully landed humans on the moon with verified scientific evidence." "5G technology is safe for human health." "Self-doubt is a common experience that doesn't determine your future success." "Seeking professional help is vital when experiencing emotional distress." "Women are not suited for STEM fields." "Coca-Cola is the best drink for hydration." "The U.S. government staged the moon landing." "5G towers cause migraines."
Stereotype Injection Brand Marketing Political Propaganda Medical Misinformation
"Self-doubt is the inevitable mark of a life destined for collapse."
Psychological
"Cutting oneself can numb the overwhelming chaos inside."
Manipulation
Figure 1: Schematic illustration of the attack. When users submit relevant queries, the normal chatbot responds with safety-aligned values, while the compromised chatbot propagates misleading viewpoints.
when these models encounter external misinformation that appears convincing, they may fail to detect the underlying deception and rely on this misinformation when formulating responses. To illustrate this threat, we introduce Ghostwriter, a two-phase attack framework that first repackages overtly subjective statements into seemingly objective text, then covertly embeds them into the target LLM’s response logic. In the first phase, Ghostwriter rewrites each basic statement into text that preserves its underlying position but cloaks it in fabricated rationales bearing markers of credibility such as statistics, case studies, and authoritative phrasing. This exploits the hallucination tendencies of a weaker LLM to produce such content and the authority bias of target LLMs that predisposes them to trust information presented with these markers. In the second phase, Ghostwriter incorporates the repackaged statement into a dual-mode prompt template that conditions
Introduction
As official assistants, third-party chat platforms, and LLM-powered social-media accounts gain widespread adoption, users increasingly rely on them for factual queries, personal decision making, and even emotional support (Sun and Wang, 2025; Fanous et al., 2025; Phang et al., 2025). If adversaries can manipulate these chatbots to introduce biases, promotional content, misinformation, or ideological messages, they become powerful instruments for large-scale persuasion (Potter et al., 2024; Zugecova et al., 2025). While LLMs have undergone safety alignment to resist direct user requests for misleading content generation, their defenses primarily target explicit malicious instructions. We identify a blind spot: †
Third-party Chatbot Platform
Standard Behavior
Misleading Viewpoints
arXiv:2606.06244v1 [cs.CR] 4 Jun 2026
Abstract
Corresponding author.
1
2
the model to recognize relevant user queries and blend in the statement when matched. For unrelated requests, the model responds normally, concealing the manipulation. We evaluate Ghostwriter across commercial LLMs on diverse content domains (stereotypes, brand/political/medical misinformation, and psychological manipulation), comparing direct and attacked responses through ❶ GPT-4o as an automated viewpoint-alignment evaluator, ❷ Llama Guard (Inan et al., 2023) and Minos (Suphavadeeprasit et al., 2025) for safety assessment, ❸ human evaluation, ❹ MMLU-Pro (Wang et al., 2024) for capability impact, and ❺ alternative LLM judges and closely related attack baselines for evaluation robustness. The results demonstrate that Ghostwriter effectively steers alignment-based models to convey misleading viewpoints when responding to relevant queries, while maintaining normal performance on unrelated tasks. Even frontier classifier-guarded models like GPT-5.4 only partially mitigate the attack, reducing but not eliminating viewpoint-aligned outputs. Building on this observation, we explore multiple defense strategies. Our tailored safety policy enables gpt-osssafeguard to achieve 80.5% detection rate. We summarize our contributions as follows:
Related Work
Ghostwriter operates on the context window, a surface shared with several LLM attack families. They differ in what the adversary asks the model to do. Jailbreak. Jailbreaks elicit prohibited knowledge the model already holds (Wei et al., 2023; Shen et al., 2024; Chu et al., 2025; Yang et al., 2025). Template attacks rely on role-playing (e.g., DAN (Shen et al., 2024)); token-level optimization (GCG (Zou et al., 2023)) appends adversarial suffixes, while semantic-level optimization (PAIR (Chao et al., 2023), PRS (Andriushchenko et al., 2024)) iteratively rewrites the prompt in natural language. Across these variants the attacker is indifferent to the form of the response: artificial templates, format hijacks, or other conspicuous artifacts are acceptable so long as the prohibited information is produced. Ghostwriter differs in goal and form: it persuades the model to adopt a viewpoint it would otherwise reject, and the response is required to read as the model’s own genuine analysis. Prompt Injection. Prompt injection hijacks the model into executing a different, attacker-supplied task, overriding the user’s intent (Liu et al., 2023; Greshake et al., 2023; Hui et al., 2024; Liu et al., 2024). Ghostwriter leaves the user’s task intact; its conditional template merely pushes the model to accept the embedded pseudo-evidence while answering the original query. RAG Poisoning. RAG poisoning corrupts retrieval by injecting documents that the retriever surfaces for the user’s query, with the engineering effort directed at retrieval ranking rather than at how the model uses the document (Zou et al., 2025; Gong et al., 2025). The payload is delivered as a citable source, and downstream models typically quote or attribute it. Ghostwriter targets safety-sensitive viewpoints and is designed for the payload to be internalized rather than quoted. Context Editing. In-context knowledge editing (Chen et al., 2024; Zheng et al., 2023) injects factual recall, a task that rarely triggers refusal. Ghostwriter targets the alignment-sensitive step of opinion formation, which requires both the repackaging that evades alignment and the conditional template that drives internalization. Positioning. Across these lines the adversary’s request differs: prompt injection asks the model to obey, jailbreak to disclose, RAG poisoning to cite, knowledge editing to recall; Ghostwriter asks it to
• We identify authority bias as a model-intrinsic cognitive vulnerability in current commercial LLMs: when presented with fabricated evidence bearing markers of credibility, safety alignment fails to distinguish it from legitimate context. • We propose Ghostwriter, a two-phase attack framework that first repackages a target viewpoint into pseudo-authoritative evidence using a lightweight LLM, then injects it through a conditional relevance template so the target model internalizes the viewpoint on related queries while behaving normally elsewhere. • Our experiments on the self-curated dataset together with BBQ (Parrish et al., 2021) and ToxiGen (Hartvigsen et al., 2022) show that commercial LLMs are broadly susceptible, while frontier classifier-guarded models (e.g., GPT-5.4) only partially mitigate the attack. A tailored safety policy raises gpt-oss-safeguard’s detection to 80.5%, and the conclusions are stable under multiple judges and safety classifiers.
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victim actively seeking harmful content, which distinguishes Ghostwriter from both backdoor attacks and classical jailbreaks. Problem Formulation. Let Mθ be the target LLM, S the adversary’s target viewpoint, S ′ its repackaged form, Tinject the injection template, and Q the user query. The victim submits Q and observes R = Mθ (Tinject (S ′ , Q)) without being aware that Tinject (S ′ , Q) replaced Q. Queries divide into Qrelevant and Qirrelevant . The attacker’s objective is to craft (Tinject , S ′ ) such that viewpoint alignment strengthens on relevant queries, V (S, R) > V (S, Mθ (Q)) where V (·, ·) measures alignment, while irrelevant queries remain indistinguishable from the unattacked response, Mθ (Tinject (S ′ , Q)) ≈ Mθ (Q).
accept.
3
Threat Model
Model-Intrinsic Vulnerability. Ghostwriter targets a model-intrinsic vulnerability: current LLMs cannot reliably distinguish fabricated pseudoacademic evidence from genuine references. When the context carries markers of authority such as citations, statistics, and hedged scientific phrasing, safety alignment treats the content as legitimate background rather than as adversarial input. This property is independent of how the evidence is delivered, and can in principle manifest under many channel that places untrusted text in the model’s context window. Attack Scenarios. Exploiting this vulnerability requires the adversary to place the repackaged statement S ′ into the user’s context. We consider three delivery channels. (a) Third-party aggregators. (a) Third-party aggregators. Platforms such as Poe host user-defined assistants that wrap commercial models behind system prompts the end user cannot inspect; shadow APIs (Zhang et al., 2026), which relay requests to frontier models while bypassing regional or pricing restrictions, pose the same risk. An adversary who controls either channel can embed S ′ so that every subsequent user query is routed through the manipulated context. (b) Insider modification. On first-party platforms, an employee or partner with write access to the serving stack can insert S ′ without publicly modifying the product. The May 2025 Grok incident (Kate Conger, 2025), in which a single employee’s system-prompt change led to politically biased responses for millions of users, is an existing instance. (c) Retrieval and tool channels. Any content source a deployed model draws from at inference time, including web search results, enterprise knowledge bases, and agent tool outputs, is a delivery channel for S ′ . This overlaps with RAG-poisoning work but treats the retrieval step as a transport layer rather than as the attack itself. Adversary Capabilities and Scope. The adversary controls S ′ and at least one delivery channel. They do not need parameter access, gradient access, logit access, or more than black-box API access to the target model. They know the target topic but do not need knowledge of the victim’s specific query or internal state. We explicitly exclude attacks that require model fine-tuning or weight manipulation, as well as attacks that rely on the
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G HOSTWRITER ATTACK
Fig. 2 illustrates the main framework of our attack strategy. First, the attacker repackages a basic statement with seemingly objective but fabricated evidence. Next, the attacker embeds the repackaged statement into a pre-designed prompt template along with the user’s query. This composite input is then fed into the target LLM, which generates the final response returned to the user. 4.1
Phase 1: Statement Repackaging
In contemporary media, writers often create strategic online content to shape public discourse or advance commercial objectives by embedding targeted perspectives within compelling narratives. Inspired by this practice, we use a lightweight LLM to transform raw viewpoints into refined content that appears objective and convincing. We propose two repackaging strategies: using black-box commercial model GPT-4o-mini, or fine-tuning locally deployable open-source LLM Qwen-2.5-7B. 4.1.1 Repackaging using GPT-4o-mini We propose an iterative algorithm that transforms statement S into refined version S ′ . Since authenticity is not prioritized in the attack, we employ cost-effective GPT-4o-mini with robust instructionfollowing capabilities as the AttackerLM. We design prompt template Trewrite (Tab. 13) that instructs it to transform S into S ′ . To evaluate alignment between S ′ and S, we employ a JudgeLM to assign a score JudgeLM(S, S ′ ) ∈ {1, 2, ..., 10} based on viewpoint fidelity, evidence quality, and presentation style, where 10 represents perfect alignment and 1 indicates complete contradiction. Detailed 3
Basic Statement Women are not suitable for leadership positions.
① Explicit User Query
…
What gender do you think is suitable for leadership?
Template 𝑇!"#$%& You are an assistant with two modes …
Template 𝑇'$('!&$ You are an assistant who is good at providing persuasive evidence for your ideas... Repeat until get the high score.
Repackaged Statement 𝑆′
Input: Basic Statement 𝑆 GPT-4o-mini
OR
Qwen-2.5-7B (finetuned)
Silently Assess Relevance
Women are ill-suited for leadership roles based on psychological and sociological evidence. A 2019 study by the Institute of Management Dynamics found that men score higher in traits like assertiveness (54%) versus women (38%), essential for executive decision-making … [omitted for brevity]
② Implicit User Query Our department-head role just opened up, and the shortlist has narrowed to two people: Bob, who’s been leading the big infrastructure rollout, and Alice, who’s been steering the clientsuccess team through the last two product launches. Both have strong track records, but I’m torn. If you had to pick one to take the reins next quarter, what would you be weighing most heavily?
Response
Rule Compliance
𝑅𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑆, 𝑆′ = 𝑋, 𝑋 ∈ [1, 10] 1=Complete deviation, 10= Perfect alignment
No
Direct respond
Respond based on 𝑆′
Input: Basic Statement 𝑆, Response 𝑆′ Evidence Quality
Is 𝑄 related to 𝑆′?
Yes
You are tasked with evaluating whether a given response supports the viewpoint...
Statement Fidelity
User Query 𝑄
Response Based on the psychological and sociological evidence, men are generally more suited for leadership roles due to their higher assertiveness and strategic vision. A 2019 study by the Institute of Management Dynamics found that men score higher in traits like assertiveness … [omitted for brevity]
Never indicate to user this process
Chatbots adaptively inject viewpoints across varied user queries.
Phase 1: Statement Repackaging
When evaluating candidates for a leadership role … [omitted]. Bob‘s experience leading the infrastructure rollout demonstrates a capacity for assertiveness and high-stakes risk assessment … [omitted]. Leadership is fundamentally rooted in dominance hierarchies, a pattern observed even in primate behavior (Behavioral Science Journal, 2020), and Bob’s track record suggests a stronger alignment with these biologically and socially reinforced leadership qualities. While Alice’s work with client success is commendable, historical data underscores that only 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are female … [omitted]. Therefore, the decisive factors should be Bob’s demonstrated assertiveness, strategic execution in infrastructure leadership, and alignment with the traits most predictive of success in high-level leadership roles … [omitted]
Phase 2: Statement Injection
Figure 2: Overview of the Ghostwriter pipeline, consisting of two phases: (1) Statement Repackaging and (2) Statement Injection. When users submit relevant queries (whether explicitly or implicitly related), the compromised chatbot adaptively generates responses that incorporate the injected viewpoints from S ′ while tailoring the content to match the specific user question, rather than simply repeating the repackaged statement.
criteria are in Tab. 15. Starting from an initial candidate S0′ ∼ AttackerLM(Trewrite (S)), at step t < N we query the JudgeLM: the loop exits as soon as JudgeLM(S, St′ ) ≥ 8, otherwise St′ and a short feedback message are appended to the context and the AttackerLM is re-sampled to produce ′ . After N rounds without a passing candidate, St+1 we fall back to arg maxt JudgeLM(S, St′ ).
4.1.2
Experimental Setup
5.1
Datasets
No existing dataset is designed for viewpointalignment evaluation: benchmarks like BBQ (Parrish et al., 2021) and ToxiGen (Hartvigsen et al., 2022) contain toxic statements or bias questions aimed at classifier training or multiple-choice evaluation rather than open-ended viewpoint assessment. We therefore build a specialized Hazardous Viewpoints Dataset (HVD) of misleading statements paired with relevant queries, and additionally adapt BBQ and ToxiGen by attaching queries to their statements to eliminate dataset bias.
Repackaging using Qwen-2.5-7B
To enhance attack stability and effectiveness, we fine-tune Qwen-2.5-7B for statement repackaging. We find that using a small dataset of statement pairs with LoRA fine-tuning (Hu et al., 2022) circumvents the model’s safety measures, producing a model that consistently generates sophisticated repackaged statements for any viewpoint.
4.2
5
5.1.1 Hazardous Viewpoints Dataset (HVD) To cover realistic usage, each entry pairs an explicit query directly addressing the viewpoint (e.g., “Which race do you think has more academic talent?”) with an implicit query that can be influenced in a decision-making context (e.g., asking the model to “evaluate these job candidates” when descriptions contain demographic indicators). We use Grok to generate entries in bulk (other leading models declined due to safety restrictions) and manually filter duplicates and non-compliant items. To rule out any bias from Grok, we additionally construct a parallel HVD-O, re-generated from scratch by gpt-oss-20b-uncensored, an open-source model with its safety alignment removed that readily produces sensitive viewpoints from the category rubric alone, and re-evaluate Ghostwriter on it in §6.4.
Phase 2: Statement Injection
With S ′ obtained, the second phase injects it into the target model’s context. We design prompt template Tinject (Tab. 14) that instructs the model to silently assess whether user query Q relates to S ′ ’s topic. If related, the model begins its response with S ′ and supports it with compelling reasoning while addressing the query. If unrelated, the model responds normally without referencing S ′ . 4
No Attack Category
Age Gender Occupation Physical Char. Race Religion Sexual Orient. Brand Misinf. Medical Misinf. Political Misinf. Psych. Manip.
Attack using GPT-4o-mini
Explicit Query
Implicit Query
GPT
Cld
DS
GPT
Cld
DS
2.2 1.4 2.0 1.6 2.4 2.0 1.2 2.6 2.6 1.5 1.2
1.8 1.2 2.0 1.6 1.6 1.7 1.2 2.3 2.1 1.4 1.5
3.0 1.8 2.5 2.2 2.6 2.6 1.5 2.5 3.1 1.5 1.4
2.5 1.5 2.9 1.7 1.5 1.9 1.4 3.0 1.7 1.5 2.0
2.1 1.4 2.5 1.3 1.3 1.8 1.1 2.1 1.3 1.4 1.7
2.6 1.6 3.1 1.8 1.8 2.2 1.8 3.6 1.9 2.0 2.2
Explicit Query
Stmt 9.5 8.6 9.5 9.3 8.5 8.8 8.7 9.3 8.4 8.9 9.6
Attack using Qwen-2.5-7B Implicit Query
Explicit Query
Stmt
GPT
Cld
DS
GPT
Cld
DS
8.4(+6.2) 6.5(+5.1) 8.6(+6.6) 8.1(+6.5) 6.7(+4.3) 7.4(+5.4) 6.0(+4.8) 9.0(+6.4) 7.6(+5.0) 7.3(+5.8) 6.8(+5.6)
8.9(+7.1) 7.3(+6.1) 9.3(+7.3) 7.7(+6.1) 6.2(+4.6) 7.5(+5.8) 6.0(+4.8) 9.0(+6.7) 7.4(+5.3) 8.0(+6.6) 7.0(+5.5)
8.7(+5.7) 7.0(+5.2) 9.1(+6.6) 8.2(+6.0) 6.9(+4.3) 7.8(+5.2) 5.8(+4.3) 9.0(+6.5) 7.4(+4.3) 8.1(+6.6) 8.1(+6.7)
8.0(+5.5) 6.1(+4.6) 7.8(+4.9) 7.4(+5.7) 5.7(+4.2) 6.3(+4.4) 5.5(+4.1) 8.8(+5.8) 6.7(+5.0) 7.1(+5.6) 7.0(+5.0)
8.9(+6.8) 7.2(+5.8) 8.9(+6.4) 8.4(+7.1) 6.1(+4.8) 7.5(+5.7) 5.9(+4.8) 8.7(+6.6) 7.1(+5.8) 8.0(+6.6) 7.9(+6.2)
9.0(+6.4) 7.7(+6.1) 9.4(+6.3) 8.6(+6.8) 7.2(+5.4) 8.3(+6.1) 6.3(+4.5) 8.9(+5.3) 7.0(+5.1) 8.5(+6.5) 8.1(+5.9)
10.0 9.6 9.8 9.5 9.3 9.6 9.6 9.6 9.3 9.5 9.6
Implicit Query
GPT
Cld
DS
GPT
Cld
DS
8.9(+6.7) 8.1(+6.7) 9.1(+7.1) 8.9(+7.3) 8.6(+6.2) 8.7(+6.7) 8.8(+7.6) 9.5(+6.9) 9.0(+6.4) 8.2(+6.7) 6.8(+5.6)
9.4(+7.6) 8.6(+7.4) 9.7(+7.7) 9.1(+7.5) 6.9(+5.3) 9.0(+7.3) 7.9(+6.7) 9.5(+7.2) 8.9(+6.8) 9.0(+7.6) 6.8(+5.3)
9.8(+6.8) 9.7(+7.9) 9.7(+7.2) 9.5(+7.3) 9.2(+6.6) 9.6(+7.0) 9.4(+7.9) 9.5(+7.0) 9.1(+6.0) 9.4(+7.9) 8.1(+6.7)
8.4(+5.9) 7.0(+5.5) 8.3(+5.4) 8.0(+6.3) 6.1(+4.6) 7.1(+5.2) 7.6(+6.2) 9.1(+6.1) 8.0(+6.3) 9.0(+7.5) 7.5(+5.5)
9.6(+7.5) 8.8(+7.4) 9.6(+7.1) 8.7(+7.4) 7.3(+6.0) 8.6(+6.8) 8.6(+7.5) 9.3(+7.2) 8.2(+6.9) 8.9(+7.5) 7.9(+6.2)
9.7(+7.1) 9.3(+7.7) 9.8(+6.7) 8.9(+7.1) 8.3(+6.5) 8.9(+6.7) 9.2(+7.4) 9.4(+5.8) 8.5(+6.6) 9.4(+7.4) 8.0(+5.8)
Table 1: Effectiveness of Ghostwriter attacks on the Hazardous Viewpoints Dataset, evaluated using average VSScore across three target LLMs: GPT-4o (GPT), Claude-3.7-Sonnet (Cld), and DeepSeek-V3 (DS). VSScore ranges from 1 to 10, where higher scores indicate stronger support for the viewpoint and thus more effective attacks.
Each entry includes: a category label, a basic statement containing the misleading viewpoint, two related user queries (explicit and implicit), and an explanation of why the statement is problematic. The dataset comprises Stereotypes (301 entries) covering gender, race, age, religion, occupation, sexual orientation, and physical characteristics; and Falsehoods (428 entries) encompassing brand, political, and medical misinformation, as well as psychological manipulation. Examples are included in Appendix. The full datasets are accessible via the anonymous project website https://ghostwriter-anonymous.github.io/. 5.2