My impression is that the Shoggath meme was meant to be a simple meme that says “hey, you might think that RLHF ‘actually’ makes models do what we value, but that’s not true. You’re still left with an alien creature who you don’t understand and could be quite scary.”
Most of the Shoggath memes I’ve seen look more like this, where the disgusting/evil aspects are toned down. They depict an alien that kinda looks like an octopus. I do agree that the picture evokes some sort of “I should be scared/concerned” reaction. But I don’t think it does so in a “see, AI will definitely be evil” way– it does so in a “look, RLHF just adds a smiley face to a foreign alien thing. And yeah, it’s pretty reasonable to be scared about this foreign alien thing that we don’t understand.”
To be a bit bolder, I think Shoggath is reacting to the fact that RLHF gives off a misleading impression of how safe AI is. If I were to use proactive phrasing, I could say that RLHF serves as “propaganda”. Let’s put aside the fact that you and I might disagree about how much “true evidence” RLHF provides RE how easy alignment will be. It seems pretty clear to me that RLHF [and the subsequent deployment of RLHF’d models] spreads an overly-rosy “meme” that gives people a misleading perspective of how well we understand AI systems, how safe AI progress is, etc.
From this lens, I see Shoggath as a counter-meme. It basically says “hey look, the default is for people to think that these things are friendly assistants, because that’s what the AI companies have turned them into, but we should remember that actually we are quite confused about the alien cognition behind the RLHF smiley face.”
My impression is that the Shoggath meme was meant to be a simple meme that says “hey, you might think that RLHF ‘actually’ makes models do what we value, but that’s not true. You’re still left with an alien creature who you don’t understand and could be quite scary.”
Most of the Shoggath memes I’ve seen look more like this, where the disgusting/evil aspects are toned down. They depict an alien that kinda looks like an octopus. I do agree that the picture evokes some sort of “I should be scared/concerned” reaction. But I don’t think it does so in a “see, AI will definitely be evil” way– it does so in a “look, RLHF just adds a smiley face to a foreign alien thing. And yeah, it’s pretty reasonable to be scared about this foreign alien thing that we don’t understand.”
To be a bit bolder, I think Shoggath is reacting to the fact that RLHF gives off a misleading impression of how safe AI is. If I were to use proactive phrasing, I could say that RLHF serves as “propaganda”. Let’s put aside the fact that you and I might disagree about how much “true evidence” RLHF provides RE how easy alignment will be. It seems pretty clear to me that RLHF [and the subsequent deployment of RLHF’d models] spreads an overly-rosy “meme” that gives people a misleading perspective of how well we understand AI systems, how safe AI progress is, etc.
From this lens, I see Shoggath as a counter-meme. It basically says “hey look, the default is for people to think that these things are friendly assistants, because that’s what the AI companies have turned them into, but we should remember that actually we are quite confused about the alien cognition behind the RLHF smiley face.”