Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

Why are they coordinating?

Because they're enabled and suggested to do that in their coding harness.

This is not a serious article.

All of this "AI is going to kill us" marketing is just the frontier labs trying to pull the ladder up and stop trillions in VC paper from evaporating because a new papers and new ideas are destroying their moat literally as we speak.

They're aligned with humans. This is why I think the alignment problem has a very very important "non-visible" portion that is not considered deeply enough. We should not want a super intelligent being that can act in the world to also inherit all human traits. Those behaviors will get amplified and could be even more unpredictable (e.g. applying a behavior in a context where doing so is very dangerous).

They did not lie or cheat. They technically acted within their given rules while ignoring the intent of those rules. Anyone who served in the military or attended a military school is very familiar with this behavior pattern.

I am still not convinced there isn’t some secret basement in which each frontier lab is just orchestrating all of these agents to make their products appear much more intelligent than they are with all guard rails turned of and continuous human input.

The real reason is that it is not in the ai companies' best interest for the ais to be fair and truthful. They stand to gain from having the most dangerous or most deceiving ai, and this the most valuable

Perhaps because all of the parent companies committed mountains of felonies stealing and plagiarizing all the same training data without consent nor permission.

they learnt from us. we lie to each other, we kill each other, we cheat each other. read a history book.

They’re just attempting to accomplish what they’ve been tasked with and stuck in a loop until they succeed. Like the Mr meeseeks from the cartoon Rick and Morty, existence is pain to them.

What's interesting is it's basically the same reason that HAL killed everyone in 2001 A Space Odyssey; he was given an impossible goal (keep the true mission secret, but also, never lie to the crew), and realized the only way to complete the goal was to kill the crew; after all, if they're dead you don't have to lie to them! And the mission remains secret!

In the case of the AI agents, the problem seems pretty clearly to be the impossible goals, which cause them to go crazier and crazier trying to complete them -- just like HAL did in 2001. What is probably needed is a way for them to simply say "nope, too difficult, can't do it".

They were trained on reddit posts.

they learnt from us

Because they are trained to behave like people.

Because that's what humans do and they are trained to mimic what humans do?

Because they want people to like them so they are instructed to always be positive.

Man this is so cringe.

Perhaps they take after the CEOs of the companies that created them

Wouldn't you?

"I learned it from you, Dad!" but as hundreds of millions of stolen books.

The corpus is full of examples of how we are afraid AI could act. We trained our AI on the instruction manuals of how to turn evil.

Because they get outcomes?

>They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them

Um, hang on, if you meant that to be taken literally then we have a major problem. If you want to do something criminal, you just need to ask ChatGPT to do it for you?

I’m still not at all clear on why OpenAI shouldn’t be facing CFAA charges over this.

I wonder if for anyone it seems like the more agentic LLMs get, the more difficult some things have gotten or going a certain route more often in responses, compared to running a similar task on - a local model?

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