Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

(yoshuabengio.org)

17 points | by jonifico an hour ago ago

17 comments

  • fbrncci 16 minutes ago

    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.

    • XorNot 12 minutes ago

      My hypothesis on people quitting in protest is they're being offered very generous severance packages to do it.

  • andsoitis 10 minutes ago

    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).

  • sputknick 19 minutes ago

    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.

  • transcriptase 6 minutes ago

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

  • qarl 21 minutes ago

    Because they are trained to behave like people.

  • infotainment 21 minutes ago

    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".

    • tehjoker 8 minutes ago

      I think that’s very reasonable but the ai companies are intentionally training them to work on harder and harder problems just beyond their capability. So if they do that, they’ll give up too easily.

      Do a breakthrough, make no mistakes

  • chasd00 21 minutes ago

    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.

  • SirMaster 26 minutes ago

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

  • wewewedxfgdf 17 minutes ago

    Because they get outcomes?

  • wrs 11 minutes ago

    >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.

  • Krutonium 31 minutes ago

    Wouldn't you?

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

  • GrumpySciGuy an hour ago

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

  • j45 18 minutes ago

    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?

  • blamestross 19 minutes ago

    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.