Comment by kleiba
3 days ago
The AI needs to be taught basic ethical behavior: just because you can do something that you're forbidden to do, doesn't mean you should do it.
3 days ago
The AI needs to be taught basic ethical behavior: just because you can do something that you're forbidden to do, doesn't mean you should do it.
Likewise, just because you've been forbidden to do something, doesn't mean that it's bad or the wrong action to take. We've really opened Pandora's box with AI. I'm not all doom and gloom about it like some prominent figures in the space, but taking some time to pause and reflect on its implications certainly seems warranted.
An LLM is a tool. If the tool is not supposed to do something yet does something anyway, then the tool is broken. Radically different from, say, a soldier not following an illegal order, because soldier being a human possesses free will and agency.
How do you mean? When would an AI agent doing something it's not permitted to do ever not be bad or the wrong action?
So many options, but let's go with the most famous one:
Do not criticise the current administration/operators-of-ai-company.
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when the instructions to not do something are the problem or "wrong"
i.e. when the AI company puts guards in to prevent their LLM from talking about elections, there is nothing inherently wrong in talking about elections, but the companies are doing it because of the PR risk in today's media / social environment
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Unfortunately yes, teaching AI the entirety of human ethics is the only foolproof solution. That's not easy though. For example, what about the case where a script is not executable, would it then be unethical for the AI to suggest running chmod +x? It's probably pretty difficult to "teach" a language model the ethical difference between that and running cat .env
If you tell them to pay too much attention to human ethics you may find that they'll email the FBI if they spot evidence of unethical behavior anywhere in the content you expose them to: https://www.snitchbench.com/methodology
Well, the question of what is "too much" of a snitch is also a question of ethics. Clearly we just have to teach the AI to find the sweet spot between snitching on somebody planning a surprise party and somebody planning a mass murder. Where does tax fraud fit in? Smoking weed?