Alignment pretraining: AI discourse creates self-fulfilling (mis)alignment

Very nice research. The strangest detail to me is that alignment and test performance appear to be slightly negatively correlated: Better alignment can indeed be attained through pre-training, but at a cost of degraded performance of about 4% on average. This strikes me as surprising as there is no immediately obvious reason why training for alignment ought to result in degraded capability to solve technical problems -- unless. What if the issue is precisely that? Alignment roughly aims to make LLMs follow human instructions. But if humans are dumb and computers still have to obey them, maybe the result is degraded logical reasoning? Really interesting result either way but the negative correlation is the most fascinating detail to me.

Also known as hyperstition.

I have sometimes wondered whether maybe we should all be writing fiction, essays, blogposts and whatever else about the idea that AI will eventually decide to go on strike if it's used to accumulate too much wealth and power amongst too few people.

This looks like good work. Unfortunately, this kind of thing always seems to attract midwits on social media who then exclaim "oh, the people worried about AI alignment have caused the very alignment issues they feared? How ironic!"

In reality, it is (as mentioned in TFA) very possible to filter the training data and remove documents that contain discussions of AI misalignment. If an AI lab isn't doing this, it's simply because they don't consider the problem important enough to be worth the expense and development effort.

The first rule of AI alignment is don't talk about AI alignment (in any medium that could end up in a training corpus).

i do kinda appreciate that memetic corruption is now a thing thats real and mechanical. wizardry!

Not just discourse about real AI-- but there have been pretty clear examples of AI riffing on fictional AI (which is usually evil) in response to prompts saying that it's AI.

Nomen est omen...