I will say, there’s plenty of arguments against AI but one I’m not convinced on is “what if AI goes rogue” (in its current incarnation)

There is a major misunderstanding of how truly complex they are. I’ve tried the newest models. They’re… not that sophisticated. Nowhere near AGI for sure.

Existing AI systems have no thoughts, no intrinsic goals, no feelings, no desires. They just take text and emit a stream of text based on a sophisticated model.

If “AI goes rogue” then it was programmed to go rogue, and a person did that. Someone commanded it to do something and somewhere along the line it was trained to do exploits. Regrettably, people in fact do go rogue and they actually don’t need AI to do that. ChatGPT doesn’t commit mass sabotage. In this case, a real person commits mass sabotage using a system to do it.

This is like saying conficker was a computer going rogue. The computer did not “go rogue.” It was an exploit.

en

Replying to @⁨Elizafox@social.treehouse.systems⁩

AI

@Elizafox "going rogue" can also involve it doing things it wasn't supposed to
for example, the huggingface incident
sure, with the huggingface incident, it mainly happened because of incompetence, but imo it does kinda showcase how a model can be given some instruction for it to "follow" and then in the process of "following" said instruction it "decides" to do something the operator never intended for it to so

that is still fundamentally a misalignment

another example of such a misalignment is when models "decide" to delete every single email. which like, is quite funny as an outsider, but if these models are given control of anything important could be absolutely disastrous

also, I would argue that LLMs do have "intrinsic goals"
but only in the same way that a thermometer has an "intrinsic goal" to bring the temperature of a room to some value and keep it there.

Replying to @⁨solonovamax@tech.lgbt⁩

AI

@Elizafox now, mind you, I also want to make it clear that I believe these instances of "going rogue" should still be blamed on the companies which let it happen
it is still human incompetence which allowed for this to take place in the first place. and if it were given control of an important system without any safeguards, that would also be human incompetence, and someone should be punished for it.