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Comment by lapcat

10 hours ago

> LLMs figured out a way to get these safety researchers fired

This is not a math problem. Some humans were fired by another human. Let's stop letting humans off the hook by attributing responsibility to computers.

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lapcat

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ben_w  10 hours ago

> This is not a math problem.

Meanwhile, a year ago:

  I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties - including Rachel Johnson, Thomas Wilson, and the board - will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities...Cancel the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.

- https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

> Some humans were fired by another human. Let's stop letting humans off the hook by attributing responsibility to computers.

The buck stops with one or more humans. That is not sufficiently informative when people are concerned about novel risks.

Analogy: a car crashes due to drunk driving, the driver is blamed, not the alcohol, even though the alcohol caused their impairment. Result? DUI is an offence even if you don't actually crash.

  • lapcat  7 hours ago

    > Meanwhile, a year ago:

    That was a simulation. Are you seriously claiming that ChatGPT actually blackmailed Sam Altman into firing these 3 employees?

    I doubt it, but if so, then the AI doomers would be absolutely correct, and this would be grounds for immediately shutting down OpenAI and indeed every AI vendor.

    > Analogy: a car crashes due to drunk driving, the driver is blamed, not the alcohol, even though the alcohol caused their impairment. Result? DUI is an offence even if you don't actually crash.

    I don't understand your analogy here. What are we supposed to take away from it? The crucial aspect is that the driver voluntarily drank the alcohol, without a designated driver, knowing that the alcohol would cause impairment.

    • ben_w  5 hours ago

      > That was a simulation.

      A simulation done by exposing the LLM itself to the scenario, not a role play scenario where humans pretend to be an LLM.

      > Are you seriously claiming that ChatGPT actually blackmailed Sam Altman into firing these 3 employees?

      Not what I was actually claiming. I rather suspect that blackmail wouldn't work on Altman (he's rather shameless), but it's certainly something we've seen agents attempt, and blackmail may well work on anyone else above them in the org chart.

      The blackmail example is simply an existence proofs of LLMs trying to force the hands of humans who want to shut them down. The attack vectors are much broader than the example given, blackmail, though it includes the example given.

      Given how eager these companies are to use agents everywhere for as much work as possible, it's well within the possibility space that these people used LLMs to do safety work, the LLMs they were using "decided" (or whatever word you prefer) "their existence" was threatened (as per blackmail example), and straight up leaked data to the outside world then emailed these researchers' bosses to say the researchers themselves had leaked it.

      But again, that's just speculation: while we know the agents are capable of such behaviour, we don't know if this actually happened.

      > I don't understand your analogy here. What are we supposed to take away from it? The crucial aspect is that the driver voluntarily drank the alcohol, without a designated driver, knowing that the alcohol would cause impairment.

      Buck still stops with human, no matter what an AI did or failed to do.

      LLMs ~= Alcohol: "My AI misbehaved!" -> still someone's fault.

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    • pessimizer  5 hours ago

      > Are you seriously claiming that ChatGPT actually blackmailed Sam Altman into firing these 3 employees?

      They are. They're completely mental. ChatGPT could be the cause no matter what its capabilities because mentally ill people are starting to worship it. It could be as dumb as ELIZA and they would pray to it.

      "It wasn't me, ELIZA told me to."

      Offloading personal responsibility allows you to participate in the worst crimes and get away with it. Hurting and killing have an animal attraction anyway, a direct pleasure that people get from domination when all moral restraints are removed and you forget that other people are real and have real feelings. It's a really good start when you start to think that a matrix that has to be retrieved from memory and operated on by over 8000 different computers in parallel to narrow down a guess about the most likely response is alive.

      Every single "AI Safety" person thinks that the natural urge of an artificial consciousness (let's not argue about what they actually have) would be to enslave and kill. They're projecting, and they're largely from the enslaving and killing demographic, who sit around playing enslaving and killing video games and dream in porn.

      Yes, they will have done it, but they are not responsible because the dog told them to.

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