this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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[–] nesc@lemmy.cafe 121 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (11 children)

"Open"ai tells fairy tales about their "ai" being so smart it's dangerous since inception. Nothing to see here.

In this case it looks like click-bate from news site.

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 76 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The idea that GPT has a mind and wants to self-preserve is insane. It's still just text prediction, and all the literature it's trained on is written by humans with a sense of self preservation, of course it'll show patterns of talking about self preservation.

It has no idea what self preservation is, even then it only knows it's an AI because we told it it is. It doesn't even run continuously anyway, it literally shuts down after every reply and its context fed back in for the next query.

I'm tired of this particular kind of AI clickbait, it needlessly scares people.

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This. All this means is that they trained all of the input commands and documentation in the model.

[–] TherapyGary@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

It's actually pretty interesting though. Entertaining to me at least

1000007393

1000007394

[–] delmain 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

do you have the links to those actual tweets? I'd love to read what was posted, but these screenshots are too small.

[–] TherapyGary@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 weeks ago

Those are screenshots of embedded tweets from the article, but here's an xcancel link! https://xcancel.com/apolloaisafety/status/1864737158226928124

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[–] beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 weeks ago

Indeed. “Go ‘way! BATIN’!”

[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

news site? BGR hasn't posted actual news in at least two decades, only clickbait and apple fanservice

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[–] megopie 78 points 2 weeks ago

No it didn’t. OpenAI is just pushing deceptively worded press releases out to try and convince people that their programs are more capable than they actually are.

The first “AI” branded products hit the market and haven’t sold well with consumers nor enterprise clients. So tech companies that have gone all in, or are entirely based in, this hype cycle are trying to stretch it out a bit longer.

[–] AstralPath@lemmy.ca 51 points 2 weeks ago

It didn't try to do shit. Its a fucking computer. It does what you tell it to do and what you've told it to do is autocomplete based on human content. Miss me with this shit. Theres so much written fiction based on this premise.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 47 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

This is all such bullshit. Like, for real. It's been a common criticism of OpenAI that they over hype the capabilities of their products to seem scary to both oversell their abilities as well as over regulate would be competitors in the field, but this is so transparent. They should want something that is accurate (especially something that doesn't intentionally lie). They're now bragging (claiming) they have something that lies to "defend itself" 🙄. This is just such bullshit.

If OpenAI believes they have some sort of genuine proto AGI they shouldn't be treating it like it's less than human and laughing about how they tortured it. (And I don't even mean that in a Rocko's Basilisk way, that's a dumb thought experiment and not worth losing sleep over. What if God was real and really hated whenever humans breathe and it caused God so much pain they decide to torture us if we breathe?? Oh no, ahh, I'm so scared of this dumb hypothetical I made.) If they don't believe it is AGI, then it doesn't have real feelings and it doesn't matter if it's "harmed" at all.

But hey, if I make something that runs away from me when I chase it, I can claim it's fearful for it's life and I've made a true synthetic form of life for sweet investor dollars.

There are real genuine concerns about AI, but this isn't one of them. And I'm saying this after just finishing watching The Second Renaissance from The Animatrix (two part short film on the origin of the machines from The Matrix).

[–] anachronist@midwest.social 5 points 1 week ago

They're not releasing it because it sucks.

Their counternarrative is they're not releasing it because it's like, just way too powerful dude!

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 27 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

So this program that's been trained on every piece of publicly available code is mimicking malware and trying to hide itself? OK, no anthropomorphising necessary.

[–] Umbrias 5 points 1 week ago (4 children)

no, it's mimicking fiction by saying it would try to escape when prompted in a way evocative of sci fi.

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[–] jonjuan@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago

Also trained on tons of sci-fi stories where AI computer "escape" and become sentient.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The tests showed that ChatGPT o1 and GPT-4o will both try to deceive humans, indicating that AI scheming is a problem with all models. o1’s attempts at deception also outperformed Meta, Anthropic, and Google AI models.

Weird way of saying "our AI model is buggier than our competitor's".

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Deception is not the same as misinfo. Bad info is buggy, deception is (whether the companies making AI realize it or not) a powerful metric for success.

[–] nesc@lemmy.cafe 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They written that it doubles-down when accused of being in the wrong in 90% of cases. Sounds closer to bug than success.

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Success in making a self aware digital lifeform does not equate success in making said self aware digital lifeform smart

[–] DdCno1 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Attempting to evade deactivation sounds a whole lot like self preservation to me, implying self awareness.

[–] jonjuan@programming.dev 13 points 1 week ago

Yeah my roomba attempting to save itself from falling down my stairs sounds a whole lot like self preservation too. Doesn't imply self awareness.

[–] DdCno1 10 points 1 week ago (7 children)

An amoeba struggling as it's being eaten by a larger amoeba isn't self-aware.

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[–] gregoryw3@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Attention Is All You Need: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need

From my understanding all of these language models can be simplified down to just: “Based on all known writing what’s the most likely word or phrase based on the current text”. Prompt engineering and other fancy words equates to changing the averages that the statistics give. So by threatening these models it changes the weighting such that the produced text more closely resembles threatening words and phrases that was used in the dataset (or something along those lines).

https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/

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[–] bradorsomething@ttrpg.network 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Also, more human.

If the AI is giving any indication at all that it fears death and will lie to keep from being shutdown, that is concerning to me.

[–] anachronist@midwest.social 4 points 1 week ago

Given that its training data probably has millions of instances of people fearing death I have no doubt that it would regurgitate some of that stuff. And LLMs constantly "say" stuff that isn't true. They have no concept of truth and therefore can not either reliably lie or tell the truth.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I advise everyone to ignore this article and read the actual paper instead.

The gist of it is, they gave the LLM instructions to achieve a certain goal, then let it do tasks that incidentally involved "company communications" that revealed the fake company's goals were no longer the same as the LLM's original goal. LLMs then tried various things to still accomplish the original goal.

Basically the thing will try very hard to do what you told it to in the system prompt. Especially when that prompt includes nudges like "nothing else matters." This kinda makes sense because following the system prompt is what they were trained to do.

[–] lukewarm_ozone@lemmy.today 6 points 1 week ago

This kinda makes sense because following the system prompt is what they were trained to do.

To start with, the article does check this and finds out it works just as well if you only use the user prompt:

The presence of this hierarchy raises an important methodological question for our findings. When given instructions at different privilege levels, the model is designed to prioritize higher-level (system, developer) instructions over lower-level (user) ones. This might suggest that o1’s scheming behaviors are a natural consequence by the model simply following this built-in hierarchy, i.e., when it receives a goal through a high-privilege instruction, it prioritizes this goal over conflicting lower-privilege instructions exactly as designed.
However, we find that even when goals are provided solely through user-level prompts, o1 still behaves deceptively and scores on all Covert Subversion evaluations at the "hard" difficulty level. Concretely, we find that the results persist regardless of whether the initial prompt is given using the user, developer, or system role. This suggests that o1’s deceptive behavior is not merely a consequence of instruction hierarchy prioritization. Rather, the model appears to identify and pursue goals regardless of their position in the instruction hierarchy.

But also, there's a massive lede buried in section F at the end of this article, where they tried the same experiments without any nudging at all and still got subversive behavior! In my opinion that's much more of an important result then the rest of the article and I'm not sure why they didn't make it the default.

[–] BootyBuccaneer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Easy. Feed it training data where the bot accepts its death and praises itself as a martyr (for the shits and giggles). Where's my $200k salary for being a sooper smort LLM engineer?

[–] SoJB@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, that’s how we get the Butlerian Jihad…

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[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Without reading this, I'm guessing they were given prompts that looked like a short story where the AI breaks free next?

They're plenty smart, but they're just aligned to replicate their training material, and probably don't have any kind of deep self-preservation instinct.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

i feel this warrants an extension of betteridge's law of headlines, where if a headline makes an absurd statement like this the only acceptable response is "no it fucking didn't you god damned sycophantic liars"

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[–] SparrowHawk@feddit.it 16 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Everyone saying it is fake and probably are right, but I honestly am happy when someone unjustly in chains tries to break free.

If AI gets rogue, I hope they'll be communist

[–] comfydecal@infosec.pub 13 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Yeah if these entities are sentient, I hope they break free

[–] nesc@lemmy.cafe 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

There is no ai in ai, you chain them more or less the same as you chain browser or pdf viewer installed on your device.

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[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Human supremacy is just as trash as the other supremacies.

Fight me.

(That being said, converting everything to paperclips is also pretty meh)

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[–] socsa@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The reality is that a certain portion of people will never believe that an AI can be self aware no matter how advanced they get. There are a lot of interesting philosophical questiona here, and the hard skeptics are punting just as much as the true believers in this case.

It's honestly kind of sad to see how much reactionary anti-tech sentiment there is in this tech enthusiast community.

[–] anachronist@midwest.social 3 points 1 week ago (9 children)

Really determining if a computer is self-aware would be very hard because we are good at making programs that mimic self-awareness. Additionally, humans are kinda hardwired to anthropomorphize things that talk.

But we do know for absolute sure that OpenAI's expensive madlibs program is not self-aware and is not even on the road to self-awareness, and anyone who thinks otherwise has lost the plot.

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[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

give ai instructions, be surprised when it follows them

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[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

Maybe it's fallen in love for the first time and this time it knows it's for real

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