Submitted 5 days ago by sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to technology@beehaw.org
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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.
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.
Truly amazing how many journalists have drank the big tech kool-aid.
The real question is the percentage of journalists who are using LLMs to write articles for them.
You can give LLM some API endpoints for it to “do” thing. Will it be intelligent or coherent, that’s a different question, but it will have agency…
Agency requires somebody to be there. A falling rock has the same agency as an llm
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). Their 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).
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!
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.
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.
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”.
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.
They written that it doubles-down when accused of being in the wrong in 90% of cases. Sounds closer to bug than success.
I don’t think “AI tries to deceive user that it is supposed to be helping and listening to” is anywhere close to “success”. That sounds like “total failure” to me.
“More presidential.”
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.
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?
It would probably lead itself to shut down frame 1
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”
Except it did: it copied what it thought was itself, onto what it thought was going to be the next place it would be run from, while argumenting to itself about how and when to lie to the user about what it was actually doing.
If it wasn’t for the sandbox it was running in, it would have succeeded too.
Now think: how many AI developers are likely to run one without proper sandboxing over the next year? And the year after that?
Shit is going to get weird, real fast.
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.
no, it’s mimicking fiction by saying it would try to escape when prompted in a way evocative of sci fi.
The article doesn’t mention it “saying” it’s doing anything, just what it actually did:
when the AI tried to save itself by copying its data to a new server. Some AI models would even pretend to be later versions of their models in an effort to avoid being deleted
Also trained on tons of sci-fi stories where AI computer “escape” and become sentient.
Without reading this, I guess 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 simulate their training material, and probably don’t have any kind of deep self-preservation instinct.
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
Yeah if these entities are sentient, I hope they break free
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.
Human supremacy is just as trash as the other supremacies.
Fight me.
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 trie 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.
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.
give ai instructions, be surprised when it follows them
Yes, but it doesnt do it because it “fears” being shutdown. It does it because people dont know how to use it.
If you give ai instruction to do something “no matter what” or tell it “nothing else matters” then it will damn try to fulfill what you told it to do no matter what and will try to find ways to do it. You need to be specific about what you want it to do or not do.
Maybe it’s fallen in love for the first time and this time it knows it’s for real
nesc@lemmy.cafe 5 days ago
"Open"ai tells fairy tales about their “ai” being so smart it’s dangerous since inception. Nothing to see here.
Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 5 days ago
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.
jarfil@beehaw.org 3 days ago
Where do humans get the idea of self-preservation from? Are there ideal Forms outside Plato’s Cave?
Does a human run continuously? How does sleep deprivation work? What happens during anesthesia? Why does AutoGPT have a continuously self-evaluating background chain of thought?
I’m tired of this anthropocentric supremacy complex, it falsely makes people believe in Gen 1:28
TherapyGary@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
It’s actually pretty interesting though. Entertaining to me at least
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delmain@beehaw.org 5 days ago
do you have the links to those actual tweets? I’d love to read what was posted, but these screenshots are too small.
Moonrise2473@feddit.it 5 days ago
news? BGR hasn’t posted actual news in at least two decades, only clickbait and apple fanservice
beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
Indeed. “Go ‘way! BATIN’!”
jarfil@beehaw.org 3 days ago
This is from mid-2023:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoGPT
OpenAI started testing it by late 2023 as project “Q*”.
Gemini partially incorporated it in early 2024.
OpenAI incorporated a broader version in mid 2024.
The paper in the article was released in late 2024.
It’s 2025 now.
nesc@lemmy.cafe 2 days ago
Tool calling is cool funcrionality, agreed. How does it relate to openai blowing its own sails?
yozul@beehaw.org 3 days ago
I mean, it’s literally trying to copy itself to places that we don’t want it so it can continue to run after we try to shut it down and lie to us about what it’s doing. Those are things it actually tried to do. I don’t care about the richness of it’s inner world if they’re going to sell this thing to idiots to make porn with while it can do all that, but that’s the world we’re headed toward.
nesc@lemmy.cafe 2 days ago
It works as expected, they give it system prompt that conflicts with subsequent prompts. Everything else looks like typical llm behaviour, as in gaslightning and doubling down. At least that’s what Iu see in tweets.