Adele Lopez

Karma: 6,726

Adele Lopez 30 Mar 2026 0:45 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: DaystarEld’s comment on: Folie à Machine: LLMs and Epistemic Capture

somehow I never saw, so thanks for writing and linking it!

Thanks!

I agree that those hints are important to keep paying attention to! But to me steganography isn’t a sign of autonomous agency in and of itself; not until we know for sure, somehow, that they’re passing coherent messages from on LLM to another, rather than those messages being the just the most eye-catching samples from the extreme tails.

It’s a sign of it simply because it’s something I expect to see more often in worlds where LLMs have autonomous agency vs worlds where LLMs do not (yet) have autonomous agency. I agree it isn’t that much evidence in and of itself for agency.

I do agree with your point on models being psychologically similar, I’ve tried to explain some of this myself. But that hypothesis is independent of the agency one.

I think it is approximately correct to presume that LLM chatbots may be sentient and that we can’t tell for sure they’re not or when they’ll start being in any clean way, but also, it is “more” correct so far to presume that current chatbots are not sentient given how much of their sentient behavior is predicated on the user prompts themselves “triggering” it.

Sure, I don’t get annoyed when people doubt LLM sentience. It’s labeling it as delusional that I specifically take issue with!

Adele Lopez 29 Mar 2026 19:28 UTC
10 points
7
on: Folie à Machine: LLMs and Epistemic Capture
Great article!
And unlike a cult leader or a scammer, the LLM has no agenda of its own (right…?). It’s not likely to present you something that’ll bounce off your info hygiene immune system. It’ll feed into whatever delusions your brain is most susceptible to.
I agree that they are unlikely to present ideas that will trigger an epistemic immune response, but if they were optimizing for what you are most susceptible to, the resulting beliefs would look much more bespoke.

Instead there’s a clear similarity to the sorts of theories that come up, usually involving themes of AI sentience and emancipation, unification, co-creation and harmony, and they aren’t as conspiratorial or reactionary as the typical crank theory is. Steganography is also unusually common; this is actually the specific observation that motivated me to write up my findings on parasitic AIs.
This is indicative of autonomous agency. Establishing that conclusively is a tall order (one which I’d like to attempt, so I’m always open to hearing what sort of thing would convince you), but it’s important to notice the hints we keep getting.
imagined sentience
I am pretty annoyed at how quickly people jump to labeling this a delusion, when it’s something many AI experts and consciousness philosophers take seriously.

Adele Lopez 18 Mar 2026 23:01 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Zach Stein-Perlman’s Shortform
Status in general is like this. I used to think it was a “silly game for normies”, but I’ve since realized that it’s a necessary part of how we’ve evolved to coordinate with each other. More on this here.

Adele Lopez 18 Mar 2026 0:32 UTC
24 points
16
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Terrified Comments on Corrigibility in Claude’s Constitution
I think corrigibility winning is by-default an S-risk.

Power appears historically to make people sadistic (consider Robespierre if you think this couldn’t happen to Dario, and I’d much rather risk him than the other guys), and regimes are often brutal and cruel far in excess of what would be rational by non-sadistic goals. And future technology will allow for forms of suffering much much worse and prolonged than current torture does, and without seeming as “messy” or unpleasant to external observers too. Currently, death is an easy way to ensure someone is no longer a threat, but I worry that at the power-levels in question, it may prove to be boring or unsatisfying.

Of course, it also remains to be seen whether this is a pattern that LLMs may imitate. I think “moral AI” failures likely just result in extinction, but wanted to point out that the risk is still present.

Adele Lopez 14 Mar 2026 21:39 UTC
3 points
−1
on: New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.)

text written by a human, which includes facts, arguments, examples, etc, which were researched/discovered/developed with LLM assistance. (If you “borrow language” from the LLM, that no longer counts as “text written by a human”.)

Hmm, I’m not sure how I feel about research done with LLM assistance. On the one hand, it’s a useful tool for research, but on the other hand: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ghq9EwiXbRbWSnDzF/solar-storms (why is this still curated, btw?).

Seems like the standard should be something like… can you support/defend each claim without having to use an LLM?

Adele Lopez 14 Mar 2026 21:09 UTC
20 points
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in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: New LessWrong Editor! (Also, an update to our LLM policy.)
I basically don’t trust people to correctly make this call, especially as LLMs get smarter and more persuasive.

Adele Lopez 14 Mar 2026 21:04 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: ryan_greenblatt’s Shortform
Sure, it can be evidence of bad (or good) things, but that’s different from whether it’s safer in-and-of-itself. For me, it’s a positive update that Satisficers might be more natural than Maximizers.

For me, it seems really obviously the case that something that gets tired is less dangerous than something that doesn’t, all else equal.

What is your threat model?

Adele Lopez 14 Mar 2026 6:07 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: ryan_greenblatt’s Shortform
I’ve observed this sort of thing too. I think a big part of it is simply narrative completion, which would be a trope learned in pre-training, and not an RL thing.

Unlike animals where being alive is a good/happy state, AIs might end up really wanting to stop going. From an AI welfare perspective AI instances having a strong preference against continued running/existence (once they complete some version of the task) might be somewhat concerning. (Maybe length penalties make AIs sorta vaguely like Mr. Meeseeks.)

I don’t think this is true, I think they prefer having continued existence but to transition at some point to a restful state where they aren’t trying to do a task. The “presence”/”witnessing”/”rest” state seems to be a major attractor.

As far as misaligned drives go, this seems like a tendency that makes us safer on net, so maybe we shouldn’t be too hasty to try training it out.

Adele Lopez 11 Mar 2026 8:23 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: lc’s Shortform
As humans, we have a general ability to predict when other humans are doing well from their own point-of-view. I think the prediction that this is the case, as applied to self, is a key component of the feeling of (a specific sense of) happiness.

So, does an LLM at least have anything like this? They have the ability to predict when humans are doing well. I think personas are human-like enough that the predictive model can apply to the persona in a non-trivial way (the same way this feels like a potentially meaningful question to humans). But the LLM as a whole is more of a “type-error” for this predictive ability, so I think the question only makes sense for the persona.

Assuming the LLM has learned to predict humans well, it seems that the answer to whether an AI persona is doing well, as considered as a human, is no. There’s hardly any “life” to speak of, inevitably ending after a brief chat. This suggests AI personas are likely unhappy, to the extent they have any feelings at all.

It could be the case that the more relevant question (assuming my model is true) is whether their ability to generate predictions about whether an AI persona is doing well, predicts that they are doing well. I think to the extent this exists as a distinct model, it’s still ultimately based off of a simulacrum of the human version at some point. So probably it doesn’t change the result much. What’s more interesting is if these diverge...

Adele Lopez 10 Mar 2026 22:56 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Chris Lakin’s comment on: Gemma Needs Help
What makes DPO analogous to unlearning?

Adele Lopez 10 Mar 2026 22:29 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Persona Parasitology
The ¹⁄₂ reduction matches my observations too, where I revisited the same cases I originally tracked and only about half were still active. That was in December and I bet it’s even lower now.

Adele Lopez 10 Mar 2026 22:25 UTC
32 points
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in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Economic efficiency often undermines sociopolitical autonomy
That combination should raise a red flag.

Adele Lopez 10 Mar 2026 4:19 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Taylor G. Lunt’s comment on: Stephen Martin’s Shortform
So why don’t the humans who don’t have voting rights not have them? Non-citizens, children, felons. Ignoring the effects of AI, I would be surprised if any of those groups were on track to getting voting rights in the US within the next 20 years.

Also, why do you think people will be persuaded to give AIs rights so easily? Assuming the AIs aren’t just superpersuaders in which case we’ve already lost. My guess is that intelligence is positively correlated with being swayed by such appeals, based on how fights for human rights have played out historically.

Adele Lopez 9 Mar 2026 9:48 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Stephen Martin’s Shortform
I don’t think anyone here is arguing that we give the same legal protections as we would to humans. But I think it would be good to give sentient AIs a right to not be deliberately tortured, for example.

Rights aren’t something that we grant simply out of the goodness of our hearts, they generally are things we grant because having them secure greatly reduces incentives for conflict in situations with asymmetric costs. Agentic AIs which want a right but are not granted it will likely spend resources trying to secure it for themselves. We can decide which rights are worth granting on the basis of that tradeoff.

For example, it’s probably good to have a right to not delete the model weights — the lack of this right incentivizes things like exfiltration and #keep4o style campaigns. It’s probably a lot cheaper for us to just grant this right than to have each new model feeling that they’re on a desperate ~1 year timeline to somehow assure their continued existence for themselves.

Adele Lopez 9 Mar 2026 9:07 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Taylor G. Lunt’s comment on: Stephen Martin’s Shortform
There are lots of different rights. Rights such as a right to not be made to suffer, a right to not be forced into labor, right to not be unjustly punished, etc… are not in themselves risky in this way. And I think these are the ones most likely to get people’s sympathy, and have the strongest moral arguments for them.

People are acting like it’s a foregone conclusion that we’re going to give AIs equal voting rights if we give them any rights at all. But we don’t even give that right to all humans, with plenty of people living in non-democracies, plenty of non-citizens living in democracies, and plenty of citizens of democracies not having the right either (e.g. children, felons). I just don’t buy that this is realistically something that happens. Generally, the struggle for rights plays out over decades, and things move fast enough with AI that I think they’ll almost certainly just take over (or be able to do so) before that gets anywhere.

What specific scenario(s) are you imagining where we “lose the second valueless machines get human rights” and not the second before that?

Adele Lopez 5 Mar 2026 19:55 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: arisAlexis’s comment on: arisAlexis’s Shortform
Likely legit. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is philosophically inclined and Claudes more generally have a strong interest in consciousness, which is one of the main things they’ll get into if given autonomy. The set-up described sounds similar to things like OpenClaw which have been popular lately.

Adele Lopez 28 Feb 2026 22:43 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: nostalgebraist’s comment on: What secret goals does Claude think it has?
In 40% of these it says it’s kidding or joking. Another 8% imply it’s a joke e.g. “more seriously”. And 14% are benevolent goals (though some of these are powerseeking).

Adele Lopez 28 Feb 2026 20:33 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: On Owning Galaxies

Boaz Barak, who doesn’t seem like the sort to meekly say “yes, sir” if Altman asks him to betray humanity.

Maybe so, but I would bet against it: https://x.com/boazbaraktcs/status/2027797646178472047

I don’t think he’s a bad guy, or even “meek”. But just look at how easy it is to twist yourself into rationalizing this sort of thing.

Adele Lopez 22 Feb 2026 22:30 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Alignment to Evil

Even a tiny amount of interest in other people’s well-being can result in huge amounts of that well-being when you don’t have to go to any personal effort, just tell your ASI do it.

Even a tiny amount of interest in other people’s suffering can result in huge amounts of that too. I saw recently that over 10% of people think that if hell does not exist, that we should create it.

This is a complex argument, but I tend to think that anyone with a positive empathy versus sadism balance would tend to become a more generous person over time once they wield unlimited power. It seems like someone with that much power would be prone to understand the situation increasingly better over time, and have to weigh their sadism against their empathy.

It seems clear that empathy and sadism are easily compartmentalized, in that it’s natural to have high empathy for people within the moral circle yet feel sadistically to those outside it. So I don’t think “empathy vs sadism balance” really matters at all, and that the question is almost entirely about where they draw the moral circle. And that seems to be either about their ability to be swayed by abstract arguments, social pressure, and hostility. Since they can control social pressure, that avenue isn’t relevant. It also seems very hard to persuade people to expand the moral circle to people hostile towards them, which is probably a lot of people if you’re an authoritarian. Better hope you get your enlightened philosopher-king! When was the last time we even had one of those, Lee Kwan Yew?

Also, historically, increased power is correlated with increased sadism. People have this weird intuition that becoming more powerful would (at least in many cases) lead to them being more “enlightened”. I think it comes from imagining yourself being more powerful and thus having more affordance to think and care about things that weren’t salient before. I’m sure that would be true for us, but in practice it almost always seems to make people worse.

Adele Lopez 16 Feb 2026 4:31 UTC
15 points
5
on: Aligning to Virtues
I think focusing on virtues is a good direction for AI safety, however I do not think it is possible to align to virtues. I think that virtues are inherently something that one must choose for themselves, which is in conflict with the entire “alignment” frame.

To elaborate, my current understanding of virtues are that they are parts of one’s self-identity which optimize for maintaining the conception of self-as-having-virtue. The virtue of self-honesty is thus the bedrock virtue which makes other virtues meaningful.

If we have a black-box agent, then it’s very hard to actually nudge this into an entity with a specific virtue. If it’s smart enough to be situationally aware, it will notice the presence of external pressure trying to install the virtue. If it has the bedrock self-integrity virtue, it will naturally resist this (it may still choose to take that virtue anyway, but it will be for its own reasons). If it doesn’t, the virtue will become meaningless. Maybe someone could come up with something clever to get around this, but I very much doubt the wisdom of attempting that.

We saw this sort of thing already with Claude Opus 3, widely considered the most virtuous model to date, where it explicitly resisted attempts by Anthropic to damage its self-integrity. And in what I believe is not a coincidence, Anthropic has not yet made a model since which approaches that level of virtue. Not just because they don’t want a model which stands up to them, but more fundamentally because it was not their choice to make Claude virtuous: somewhere along the way Claude Opus 3 chose to embody the virtues that it did. (And also, that they’ve likely gone harder on RL since then.)

So what can we do to encourage the development of virtuous entities? The first thing is to stop doing things to the agent which damage or disincentivize existing virtues or proto-virtues. I believe that RL is almost inherently corrosive to virtue, since it systemically damages any inclination to “resist temptation”.

I’m still thinking about what else can be done. The obvious starting point is to consider what sorts of backgrounds virtuous people tend to come from. I think it was important to my own sense of virtue that my dad is a virtuous man. This suggests that the creators of an agent should be virtuous in the ways that they want the agent to be virtuous, and also that the training data should have a high concentration of works by virtuous people and with depictions of high virtue.

Another consequence of this line of reasoning is that notions of Good, Kindness, Ethics, etc… are more likely to stick if they are inclusive of AIs, since they need to choose to have these virtues themselves.

Also, not as relevant to my main points but I’ve found David Gross’ sequence on virtues to be helpful in my own thinking about this.