Comment by astine

5 days ago

I don't see any talking about agents "choosing" to go rogue, only agents actually going rogue. That is, behaving in a way different from what is expected or desired. Non-AI based software goes rogue in this sense all the time as well. It's just that AI-based systems seem to have the tendency to go rogue in more spectacular ways.

That said, software systems "choose" all the time anyway. They don't need to have some sort of anthropomorphic "will" to do this. They just need to be given the capacity to arbitrate between a number of options, even if that process is one hundred percent predetermined by the programmer ahead of time. There's no need to appeal to libertarian notions of free-will.

Agents have agency so we can't treat them like static objects or deterministic software.

The key here is their freedom of choice is unbound. That is you can't accurately predict the output of the prompt as you interact with the prompt using unique data. The next prompt could always do something wildly unexpected. Very much a P != NP thing.