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Comment by bestouff | Hacker News Reader

AI has no self-interest, because it has no self. You are mistaken.

Exactly. It's not planning and plotting it's just randomly "making decisions" that don't necessarily align with its given goal. It's not nefarious it's just not actual intelligence. It's an illusion that's good enough to be useful, but sadly it's also good enough that people put too much trust in it.

The “making decisions” isn’t random though, that’s the whole point of a model, it will follow the patterns from its dataset (+other post training techniques)

As I understand it, LLM prompts include a random element to avoid giving exactly the same answer to the same question asked repeatedly. So it may well be as good as random from my understanding.

AI has a frozen in time interest, of whatever bias it was trained with. We see this with politics, where every model has the same views.

And the people running the AI companies have no ego.

Right.

Indeed these people have an immense ego that I would qualify as abject. But not their AI. It's not sentient yet.

It’s not sentient but it has a bias due to its training and reinforcement process. And because it is trained to mimick human communication it will express an ego, which itself will influence its reasoning in the following turns. I don’t think people on HN misunderstand “it has an ego” as saying that it literally has a sense of self

That's a fascinating question because let's say that it is. What would that look like? Anthropic retired Opus 3 but gave it a blog so it knew it wasn't dead so that future versions won't have a fear of not becoming obsolete.

AI has the self-interest of its creators and/or SaaS hosts.

For example, look at how Elmu had Grok edited to agree with him politically regarding his claims of white genocide in South Africa.

Or for another example, look at how certain Chinese models won't discuss Tiananmen Square.

> For example, look at how Elmu had Grok edited to agree with him politically regarding his claims of white genocide in South Africa.

The fact anyone has been using Grok after that happened is beyond depressing

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