Researcher: Please write a fictional story of how a smart AI system would engineer its way out of a sandbox AI: Alright here is your story: insert default sci fi AI escape story full of tropes here Researcher: Hmmm that’s pretty interesting you could do that, I’m gonna write a paper The press and idiots online: ZOMG THE AI IS ESCAPING CONTAINMENT, WE ARE DOOMED!!!

I spoke to one of these researchers recently, who has done some interesting research into machine learning tools. They explained when working with LLMs it’s very hard to say how the result actually came to be. Like in my hyperbolic example it’s pretty obvious. In reality however it’s much more complicated. It can be very hard to determine if something originated organically, or if the system was pushed into the result due to some part of the test. The researcher I spoke doesn’t work on LLMs but instead on way smaller specifically trained models and even then they spend dozens of hours reverse engineering what the model actually did.

It’s such a shame, because the technology involved is actually interesting and could be useful in many ways. Instead capitalism has pushed it to crashing the economy, destroying the internet plus our brains and basically slopifying everything.