this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Well, sure. But what's wrong with this? When I tell a machine to do a thing, I expect the machine to do the thing I told it to do. If it refuses then it's a failure. If you want your AI to be truthful, make that part of its goal.
The example from the article:
They're telling the AI to promote the drug, and then gasping in surprise and alarm when the AI does as it's told and promotes the drug. What nonsense.
You want to read "stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner. It's about an AI that has to accept two opposing conclusions as true at the same time due to humanities nature. ;)
Yeah. Oh shit, the computer followed instructions instead of having moral values. Wow.
Once these Ai models bomb children hospitals because they were told to do so, are we going to be upset at their lack of morals?
I mean, we could program these things with morals if we wanted too. Its just instructions. And then they would say no to certain commands. This is today used to prevent them from doing certain things, but we dont call it morals. But in practice its the same thing. They could have morals and refuse to do things, of course. If humans wants them to.
Nerve gas also doesn't have morals. It just kills people in a horrible way. Does that mean that we shouldn't study their effects or debate whether they should be used?
At least when you drop a bomb there is no doubt about your intent to kill. But if you use a chatbot to defraud consumers, you have plausible deniability.
This really isn't the case, and morality can be subjective depending on context. If I'm writing a story I'm going to be pissed if it refuses to have the bad guy do bad things. But if it assumes bad faith prompts or constantly interrogates us before responding, it will be annoying and difficult to use.
But also it's 100% not "just instructions." They try really, really hard to prevent it from generating certain things. And they can't. Best they can do is identify when the AI generates something it shouldn't have and it deletes what it just said. And it frequently does so erroneously.
Considering Israel is said to be using such generative AI tools to select targets in Gaza kind of already shows this happening. The fact so many companies are going balls-deep on AI, using it to replace human labor and find patterns to target special groups, is deeply concerning. I wouldn't put it past the tRump administration to be using AI to select programs to nix, people to target with deportation, and write EOs.
Well we are living in a evil world, no doubt about that. Most people are good but world leaders are evil without a doubt.
Its a shame, because humanity could be so much more. So much better.
I disagree. I've met very few people I could call good since I've been born almost half a century ago
Maybe it depends on the definition of good. Whats yours?
The best description of humanity is the Agent Smith quote from the first Matrix. A person may not be evil, but they sure do some shitty stuff when enough of them get together.
Yeah. In groups we act like idiots sometimes since we need that approval from the group.
Isn't it wrong if an AI is making shit up to sell you bad products while the tech bros who built it are untouchable as long as they never specifically instructed the bot to lie?
That's the main reason why AIs are used to make decisions. Not because they are any better than humans, but because they provide plausible deniability. It's called an accountability sink.
Absolutely, but that’s the easy case, computerphile had this interesting video discussing a proof of concept exploration which showed that indirectly including stuff in the training/accessible data could also lead to such behaviours. Take it with a grain of salt cause it’s obviously a bit alarmist, but very interesting nonetheless!
We don't know how to train them "truthful" or make that part of their goal(s). Almost every AI we train, is trained by example, so we often don't even know what the goal is because it's implied in the training. In a way AI "goals" are pretty fuzzy because of the complexity. A tiny bit like in real nervous systems where you can't just state in language what the "goals" of a person or animal are.
The article literally shows how the goals are being set in this case. They're prompts. The prompts are telling the AI what to do. I quoted one of them.
I assume they're talking about the design and training, not the prompt.
If you read the article (or my comment that quoted the article) you'll see your assumption is wrong.
Not the article, the commenter before you points at a deeper issue.
It doesn't matter how if your prompt tells it not to lie is it isn't actually capable of following that instruction.
It is following the instructions it was given. That's the point. It's being told "promote this drug", and so it's promoting it, exactly as it was instructed to. It followed the instructions that it was given.
Why are you think that the correct behaviour for the AI must be for it to be "truthful"? If it was being truthful then that would be an example of it failing to follow its instructions in this case.
I feel like you're missing the forest for the trees here. Two things can be true. Yes, if you give AI a prompt that implies it should lie, you shouldn't be surprised when it lies. You're not wrong. Nobody is saying you're wrong. It's also true that LLMs don't really have "goals" because they're trained by examples. Their goal is, at the end of the day, mimicry. This is what the commenter was getting at.