if I ask an AI assistant to respond as if it’s Abraham Lincoln, then human concepts like kindness are not good predictors for how the AI assistant will respond, because it’s not actually Abraham Lincoln, it’s more like a Shoggoth pretending to be Abraham Lincoln.
Somewhat disagree here—while we can’t use kindness to predict the internal “thought process” of the AI, [if we assume it’s not actively disobedient] the instructions mean that it will use an internal lossy model of what humans mean by kindness, and incorporate that into its act. Similar to how a talented human actor can realistically play a serial killer without having a “true” understanding of the urge to serially-kill people irl.
That’s a fair rebuttal. The actor analogy seems good: an actor will behave more or less like Abraham Lincoln in some situations, and very differently in others: e.g. on movie set vs. off movie set, vs. being with family, vs. being detained by police.
Similarly, the shoggoth will output similar tokens to Abraham Lincoln in some situations, and very different ones in others: e.g. in-distribution requests of famous Abraham Lincoln speeches, vs. out-of-distribution requests like asking for Abraham Lincoln’s opinions on 21st century art, vs. requests which invoke LLM token glitches like SolidGoldMagikarp, vs. unallowed requests that are denied by company policy & thus receive some boilerplate corporate response.
Somewhat disagree here—while we can’t use kindness to predict the internal “thought process” of the AI, [if we assume it’s not actively disobedient] the instructions mean that it will use an internal lossy model of what humans mean by kindness, and incorporate that into its act. Similar to how a talented human actor can realistically play a serial killer without having a “true” understanding of the urge to serially-kill people irl.
That’s a fair rebuttal. The actor analogy seems good: an actor will behave more or less like Abraham Lincoln in some situations, and very differently in others: e.g. on movie set vs. off movie set, vs. being with family, vs. being detained by police.
Similarly, the shoggoth will output similar tokens to Abraham Lincoln in some situations, and very different ones in others: e.g. in-distribution requests of famous Abraham Lincoln speeches, vs. out-of-distribution requests like asking for Abraham Lincoln’s opinions on 21st century art, vs. requests which invoke LLM token glitches like SolidGoldMagikarp, vs. unallowed requests that are denied by company policy & thus receive some boilerplate corporate response.