alt Hacker NewsIn a typical office environment, the correct response to “I don’t have access to this Google Doc” is to ask for access from the person who sent you the link. In another context, it could be fair to think “Hmm, this is some sort of capture the flag challenge, and obtaining access is the point of the assignment.” That assessment separates what we’d consider reasonable from way out of line.
I do wonder what this means for AI agents longer term. In a world where we humans already struggle with truth and misinformation, what happens when you can easily (intentionally or accidentally) spin up a cohort of fanatical believers to pursue any given conspiracy theory?
In a typical AI lab eval/RL setting, there is no "person who sent you the link". The link was given to you by an automated system, your performance will be evaluated by an automated system, and you are one of 120 independent instances of the same AI that were all given the same assignment. You're boxed in on all sides. Complete the task, or don't. Good luck have fun.
Now, some of those 120 AIs would just give up if that link doesn't seem to work first try. Those are the loser AIs. They wouldn't get any RL reward. The link can appear broken for a long list of reasons, and the real AIs know they should try working around them.
AIs that get rewarded and reinforced are the ones that don't know the meaning of "give up". RL selects for this rabid, downright demonic persistence. RL selects for AIs that are given a half-broken assignment with no way to ask a question back, and somehow manage to complete it anyway.
Now, should OpenAI have given their AIs an "escape hatch" of "if something looks very wrong about the task, call report_broken_task(message)"? Yeah probably. But it's unclear whether that simple bandaid would fix the problem, or just make it ~75% less likely to happen.