There are plenty of systems where we rationally form beliefs about likely outputs from a system without a full understanding of how it works. Weather prediction is an example.
Roko
Karma: 6,284
I should have been clear: “doing things” is a form of input/output since the AI must output some tokens or other signals to get anything done
[Question] Is AI alignment a purely functional property?
If you look at the answers there is an entire “hidden” section of the MIRI website doing technical governance!
Why is this work hidden from the main MIRI website?
nice!
“Our objective is to convince major powers to shut down the development of frontier AI systems worldwide”
This?
Who works on this?
[Question] What is MIRI currently doing?
Re: (2) it will only impact output on the current generated output, once the output is over all that stuff will be reset and the only thing that remains is the model weights which were set in stone at train time.
re: (1) “a LLM might produce text for reasons that don’t generalize like a sincere human answer would” it seems that current LLM systems are pretty good at generalizing like a human would and in some ways they are better due to being more honest, easier to monitor, etc
But do you really think we’re going to stop with tool AI, and not turn them into agents?
But if it is the case that agentic AI is an existential risk then if actors could choose not to develop it, which is a coordination problem not an alignment problem.
We already have aligned AGI, we can coordinate to not build misaligned AGI.
ok but as a matter of terminology, is a “Satan reverser” misaligned because it contains a Satan?
OK, imagine that I make an AI that works like this: a copy of Satan is instantiated and his preferences are extracted in percentiles, then sentences from Satan’s 2nd-5th percentile of outputs are randomly sampled. Then that copy of Satan is destroyed.
Is the “Satan Reverser” AI misaligned?
Is it “inner misaligned”?
So your definition of “aligned” would depend on the internals of a model, even if its measurable external behavior is always compliant and it has no memory/gets wiped after every inference?
Further on the tech tree, alignment tax can end up motivating systematic uses that make LLMs a source of danger.
Sure, but you can say the same about humans. Enron was a thing. Obeying the law is not as profitable as disobeying it.
maybe you should swap “understand ethics” for something like “follow ethics”/”display ethical behavior”
What is the difference between these two? This sounds like a distinction without a difference
Any argument which features a “by definition”
What is your definition of “Aligned” for an LLM with no attached memory then?
Wouldn’t it have to be
“The LLM outputs text which is compliant with the creator’s ethical standards and intentions”?
To add: I didn’t expect this to be controversial but it is currently on −12 agreement karma!
LLMs have plenty of internal state, the fact that it’s usually thrown away is a contingent fact about how LLMs are currently used
yes, but then your “Aligned AI based on LLMs” is just a normal LLM used in the way it is currently used.
Relevant aspects of observable behavior screen off internal state that produced it.
Yes this is a good way of putting it.
yes, but this is pretty typical for what a human would generate.