Come on, the claim “the evidence suggests that if the current ML systems were trying to deceive us, we wouldn’t be able to change them not to” absent any other qualifiers seems pretty clearly false. It is pretty important to qualify that you are talking about deceptive alignment or backdoors specifically (e.g. I’m on board with Ryan’s phrasing).
There’s a huge disanalogy between your paper’s setup and deception-in-general, which is that in your paper’s setup there is no behavioral impact at training time. Deception-in-general (e.g. sycophancy) often has behavioral impacts at training time and that’s by far the main reason to expect that we could address it.
Fwiw I thought the paper was pretty good at being clear that it was specifically deceptive alignment and backdoors that the claim applied to. But if you’re going to broaden that to a claim like “the evidence suggests that if the current ML systems were trying to deceive us, we wouldn’t be able to change them not to” without any additional qualifiers I think that’s a pretty big overclaim, and also I want to bet you on whether we can reduce sycophancy today.
Ah, sure—I agree that we don’t say anything about sycophancy-style deception. I interpreted “deception” there in context to refer to deceptive alignment specifically. The word deception is unfortunately a bit overloaded.
Come on, the claim “the evidence suggests that if the current ML systems were trying to deceive us, we wouldn’t be able to change them not to” absent any other qualifiers seems pretty clearly false. It is pretty important to qualify that you are talking about deceptive alignment or backdoors specifically (e.g. I’m on board with Ryan’s phrasing).
There’s a huge disanalogy between your paper’s setup and deception-in-general, which is that in your paper’s setup there is no behavioral impact at training time. Deception-in-general (e.g. sycophancy) often has behavioral impacts at training time and that’s by far the main reason to expect that we could address it.
Fwiw I thought the paper was pretty good at being clear that it was specifically deceptive alignment and backdoors that the claim applied to. But if you’re going to broaden that to a claim like “the evidence suggests that if the current ML systems were trying to deceive us, we wouldn’t be able to change them not to” without any additional qualifiers I think that’s a pretty big overclaim, and also I want to bet you on whether we can reduce sycophancy today.
Ah, sure—I agree that we don’t say anything about sycophancy-style deception. I interpreted “deception” there in context to refer to deceptive alignment specifically. The word deception is unfortunately a bit overloaded.