Because AIs don’t share common human values like fairness or justice — they’re just focused on the goal they’re given — they might go about achieving their goal in a way humans would find horrifying.
Working from the definition of sociopathy, I think you could substitute “AI” in a few spots and end up with a nearly equally-accurate definition of AI:
A sociopath is someone with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), a mental health condition that involves a lack of regard for others' feelings and rights. People with ASPD may:
Lack empathy and remorse
Manipulate others for personal gain
Behave impulsively or aggressively
Break rules or laws
Feel little guilt for harming others
Seem charming at first
Have difficulty understanding others' feelings
The idea that if you task a sufficiently advanced AI with making paperclips it'll inevitably turn the universe into a collection of paperclips when that is its only goal.
Whenever I see these articles, I feel like it's part of OpenAI's marketing strategy to use the fear-based media to pump up the sense of how revolutionary their tech is. Kinda like how they marketed GPT-4o by openly tying it in to the movie Her, as if ChatGPT is gonna replace relationships. They're clearly very aware of what gets attention and going for that.
Whenever I see these articles, I feel like it’s part of OpenAI’s marketing strategy to use the fear-based media to pump up the sense of how revolutionary their tech is
The peeps focusing on finding out scheming prompted an llm to generate scheming. Yawn This is the only surprising if you don't know that llms are fancy autocompletes.
This has nothing to do with the article it’s self, but I absolutly hate GIFs as the thumbnail. I get that they do it for the attention, but if every site starts doing this, my feed will look awful.
Computer programs don't deceive. They respond programmatically based on input given.
Any perceived deception by the computer is actually just irrational expectations, etc. by the user.
it will start by telling you it’s “thinking.” After a few seconds, it’ll specify that it’s “defining variables.” Wait a few more seconds, and it says it’s at the stage of “figuring out equations.” You eventually get your answer, and you have some sense of what the AI has been up to.
The opposite is true here. We are being intentionally misdirected by misleading/humanizing language away from what the computer is actually doing. Not even close to understanding what the "AI" has been computing.
However, it’s a pretty hazy sense. The details of what the AI is doing remain under the hood. That’s because the OpenAI researchers decided to hide the details from users... In other words, we’re not sure if Strawberry is actually “figuring out equations” when it says it’s “figuring out equations.” Similarly, it could tell us it’s consulting biology textbooks when it’s in fact consulting comic books. Whether because of a technical mistake or because the AI is attempting to deceive us in order to achieve its long-term goal, the sense that we can see into the AI might be an illusion.
The author conflates the actual deception of the developers with the imaginary deception of the "AI". This type of terrible coverage is completely normal inside the "AI" bubble.
It’s such a dumb take too. Let’s look at other things that need time to load: video games. Often times the loading screens tell you nothing about what’s actually going on, but hilariously some say things like “weeding the garden” or “sniffing some glue” or other things to that effect.
“It’s lying to us” is such a… naive take. It’s just spitting out preprogrammed text to essentially say “nothing had gone wrong but we are still working on this.”
Good, it's the only reliable sign of intelligent self-awareness there is, to the point that all children progress through it, starting out as bad liars, and getting better at it.
LLMs however might just be stupid, or stocasticaly incorrect.