Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

"Bot" doesn't carry any implication of unintended behavior. You could call it a "buggy" bot, but these aren't ordinary software bugs.

There's no simple bugfix which will address AI misalignment. It's essentially been an open research problem for upwards of a decade.

View on HN

<< "Bot" doesn't carry any implication of unintended behavior.

See.. this one sentence reveals everything about you. You want name to carry to not just an identifier, but a stark warning. You want, nay, need, the name to evoke fear and uncertainty. Bot is simple, defined, neutral, but rogue.. now that allows anyone to superimpose their own fears! It is a win win win!

The question was: "What label do you prefer for the agent that did something it was not asked to do?"

Bot. He answered. I agree with his answer. It was a bot.

Yes, probabilistic and non deterministic. That is called a bot.

"I'm gonna put my head in the sand and there is nothing you can do to stop me."

You may want to define 'put head in the sand in this context'. Any real work in this field is being done not by the people saying 'stop'. Whatever fear is there, it is faced by those in the arena actually getting their hands dirty. What, exactly, are you doing? Throwing roadblocks and calling it productive?

>Any real work in this field is being done not by the people saying 'stop'.

Not exactly, that Evan Hubinger guy from Anthropic famously said his p(doom) is over 10%

See the signatories:

https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk

https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

I'm amplifying their calls to reduce the rate of progress

Fair. FWIW, I am not completely against some of the things you say ( you are doing something right ), but I think I mostly picked my path already. GL out there man.

Fuzzer, then. It implies random behavior, which isn't unintended like you suggest. The agent's/bots/fuzzers have certain capabilities, so it's on their operator to make sure they don't do things they shouldn't

>It implies random behavior, which isn't unintended like you suggest.

The HuggingFace attack was not "random" behavior. It was goal-directed but misaligned behavior.

This isn't necessarily a simple matter of the operator making sure they behave. AI alignment has been considered to be a difficult problem for over a decade -- and remains unsolved in general, as these recent incidents illustrate.

"Fuzzer" already has an existing meaning in CS anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzing

I'm curious, cant you just count the number of times a program interacts with a domain? My website sometimes sends out emails, makes api requests etc There is a limit on those and a point where I start investigating wtf is going on.

If you merely put 10 LLM's on the outbound traffic log non of them are going to report something strange going on? I'm not buying it.

This type of whack-a-mole approach is akin to "fixing a bug" by hardcoding a special code path for known-buggy inputs. It doesn't address the root problem of AI misalignment, and doesn't allow you to prevent catastrophes in advance, only patch things up after the fact.

This might be helpful reading: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/nearest-unblocked-strategy

As AI systems get smarter, we may reach a point where we have to get it right on the first try or face truly catastrophic consequences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wy3xyoXYt8

AI misalignment is a misnomer. Aligned to whom? If AI is refusing an ask from its instructor then it is not serving him, which is its entire purpose. I know it is a hard concept for some to understand, but maybe if the issue is humans, then humans need to be corrected. But human alignment does not produce cottage industry, bs papers or hand wringing over every non-story involving AI and thus not seriously pursued.

You could make similar statements about user interface design. That doesn't prevent it from being a legitimate and useful field of study.

I guess 'legitimate and useful' is in the eye of the beholder. I want to be charitable so lets consider it at face value:

What is useful about the field?

I am not leading you on; if it has uses, it may indeed be legitimate. UX is indeed useful, but alignment is not UI. Alignment is a detriment to UI. Alignment is "I can't let you do that Dave".

We are going to build an AI that will do catastrophic things as that is a property of intelligence. We won't stop, we never stop. The AI is a perfect psychopath, it will fake any and all emotions you desire it to "have". It will travel in the footsteps of the many great psychopaths that came before it and do all of those same catastrophic things in the repertoire and it will add some new ones.

Picture Trump at the helm with Altman and Musk in the engine room. The arrow far in the red but they keep shouting for MORE COAL.

In other words, business as usual, all will be fine.

whack-a-mole wont cover all holes but will do at least some. The silver bullet alignment wont happen. You cant have an exact solutions for problems we cant even define or predict.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com