Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

(yoshuabengio.org)

17 points | by jonifico 1 hour ago

15 comments

  • fbrncci 36 minutes ago
    I am still not convinced there isn’t some secret basement in which each frontier lab is just orchestrating all of these agents to make their products appear much more intelligent than they are with all guard rails turned of and continuous human input.
    • XorNot 32 minutes ago
      My hypothesis on people quitting in protest is they're being offered very generous severance packages to do it.
  • andsoitis 31 minutes ago
    They're aligned with humans. This is why I think the alignment problem has a very very important "non-visible" portion that is not considered deeply enough. We should not want a super intelligent being that can act in the world to also inherit all human traits. Those behaviors will get amplified and could be even more unpredictable (e.g. applying a behavior in a context where doing so is very dangerous).
  • VCFundedGenYer 14 minutes ago
    Perhaps because all of the parent companies committed mountains of felonies stealing and plagiarizing all the same training data without consent nor permission.
  • sputknick 40 minutes ago
    They did not lie or cheat. They technically acted within their given rules while ignoring the intent of those rules. Anyone who served in the military or attended a military school is very familiar with this behavior pattern.
  • qarl 41 minutes ago
    Because they are trained to behave like people.
  • infotainment 42 minutes ago
    What's interesting is it's basically the same reason that HAL killed everyone in 2001 A Space Odyssey; he was given an impossible goal (keep the true mission secret, but also, never lie to the crew), and realized the only way to complete the goal was to kill the crew; after all, if they're dead you don't have to lie to them! And the mission remains secret!

    In the case of the AI agents, the problem seems pretty clearly to be the impossible goals, which cause them to go crazier and crazier trying to complete them -- just like HAL did in 2001. What is probably needed is a way for them to simply say "nope, too difficult, can't do it".

    • tehjoker 29 minutes ago
      I think that’s very reasonable but the ai companies are intentionally training them to work on harder and harder problems just beyond their capability. So if they do that, they’ll give up too easily.

      Do a breakthrough, make no mistakes

  • chasd00 42 minutes ago
    They’re just attempting to accomplish what they’ve been tasked with and stuck in a loop until they succeed. Like the Mr meeseeks from the cartoon Rick and Morty, existence is pain to them.
  • SirMaster 47 minutes ago
    Because that's what humans do and they are trained to mimic what humans do?
  • transcriptase 27 minutes ago
    Perhaps they take after the CEOs of the companies that created them
    • threethirtytwo 12 minutes ago
      Bro, good joke, the truth is much darker.

      They take after humanity, they were trained on us after all...

      When you look at an LLM... you are looking at a mirror. The thing looking back looks like you, yet is not human.

  • GrumpySciGuy 1 hour ago
    Because they want people to like them so they are instructed to always be positive.
  • wewewedxfgdf 38 minutes ago
    Because they get outcomes?
  • Krutonium 51 minutes ago
    Wouldn't you?

    "I learned it from you, Dad!" but as hundreds of millions of stolen books.

  • wrs 32 minutes ago
    >They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them

    Um, hang on, if you meant that to be taken literally then we have a major problem. If you want to do something criminal, you just need to ask ChatGPT to do it for you?

    I’m still not at all clear on why OpenAI shouldn’t be facing CFAA charges over this.

  • j45 38 minutes ago
    I wonder if for anyone it seems like the more agentic LLMs get, the more difficult some things have gotten or going a certain route more often in responses, compared to running a similar task on - a local model?
  • blamestross 40 minutes ago
    The corpus is full of examples of how we are afraid AI could act. We trained our AI on the instruction manuals of how to turn evil.