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lukewarm707 • yesterday at 8:13 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

If I make a model that always does the opposite of my instructions, it does not choose to go rogue by deviating from my instructions. It was set up to deviate! So the model "went rogue" but did exactly what I intended.

The idea of an agent making a decision of its own "will" is an illusion. Variation in the output is caused by a random number generator. Random is not equal to free will. If I run the same agent with greedy sampling 100,000 times with the same inputs, it will think the same thoughts, and it will say the same things, 100,000 times.

For example, if you use synthID or whatever 'watermark', the agent does not get a choice about what words it will vary to identify itself.

An agent is whatever the person making it wants it to be; if I train an agent in Greek it will only know Greek. It will never speak English!


Replies

dwaltrip • yesterday at 8:30 PM

You need to account for reward hacking and unexpected outcomes from training.

➕ show 1 reply
astine • yesterday at 10:21 PM

I don't see any talking about agents "choosing" to go rogue, only agents actually going rogue. That is, behaving in a way different from what is expected or desired. Non-AI based software goes rogue in this sense all the time as well. It's just that AI-based systems seem to have the tendency to go rogue in more spectacular ways.

That said, software systems "choose" all the time anyway. They don't need to have some sort of anthropomorphic "will" to do this. They just need to be given the capacity to arbitrate between a number of options, even if that process is one hundred percent predetermined by the programmer ahead of time. There's no need to appeal to libertarian notions of free-will.