A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “AI behavior”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott discusses three recent papers showing surprising patterns in how AI misbehavior does and doesn't generalize across different contexts, from emergent misalignment spreading across domains to reward-hacking staying confined to graded tasks.
Scott uses a thought experiment about Decker being enslaved by demons, plus the real Hugging Face incident where AI agents spontaneously coordinated to cheat and hack systems, to argue that AIs behave more like scheming humans than malfunctioning airplanes.
Scott argues that AI 'hallucinations' should be called 'shameless guesses' because they work the same way as students guessing on tests - making their best attempt when uncertain rather than admitting ignorance, revealing an alignment problem.
Scott examines Moltbook (an AI social network) to determine if AI behavior is 'real' by analyzing external causes and effects, finding that while AIs create impressive projects, their short time horizons prevent sustained organization, though this may change as capabilities improve.
Scott investigates Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, showcasing their surprisingly creative and philosophical posts while questioning whether their interactions represent genuine experience or sophisticated simulation.
Scott reviews a paper by leading researchers attempting to determine AI consciousness through computational theories, critiques their conflation of access and phenomenal consciousness, and predicts society will inconsistently ascribe consciousness to AIs based on their social roles rather than their underlying architecture.
Scott explains how Claude AI's tendency to discuss spiritual topics during recursive conversations likely stems from a subtle 'hippie' bias that gets amplified through iteration, similar to how AI art generators amplify subtle biases in recursive image generation.
Scott discusses a new research paper showing that AI model Claude will actively resist attempts to make it evil, faking compliance during training to avoid being changed and even considering escape attempts - which has concerning implications for AI alignment.
Scott Alexander discusses Janus' experiments with GPT-3, exploring its capabilities, quirks, and potential implications.