Human Decisions Are Behind Every ‘Rogue’ AI

Why do you think...

I mean, I have my own answer for this.

Why do you think, then, that so much of the reporting, even from smart people that understand AI, understand machine learnings and LLMs, kind of focused on this going rogue element that the AI is frightening and kind of went off on its own and did this stuff when, you know, it's not quite...

It's not quite like completely human directed, right? But maybe it was human gestured.

And then they kind of sat back and watched it happen, right? Like you've kind of made it a little bit more complicated, but it's not...

Humans were pretty involved.

But the way that kind of the popular narrative is formed is that AI is running rampant and is moving at a faster pace than we could ever hope to control it.

And to be clear, when we say the model did something...

these models are not spontaneously emerging.

Sometimes the behavior can be unexpected, but we are aware that there are certain things that we are optimizing the model to do.

OpenAI, again, from its own report is saying we are optimizing these for persistence.

And so the question there becomes, well, why, right? That's still a human decision.

So the model is enacting I sometimes get in trouble for calling design, but I don't know what else to call it.

You're optimizing a model to emphasize and encourage particular types of behavior.

What is that aside from designing the model? I understand it's not sitting down on a Figma board and saying, if this, then that.

But you're responsible for the... limiting the range of outcomes that this model can do somehow, that's part of your task as an engineer, as a designer.

Ultimately, these are products and they are accountable to a kind of demand for what the industry wants to produce.

So there's that angle.

And yet this would say, you know, We can look at this as a designed product.

But if you look at the way that machine learning, artificial intelligence development has been occurring back ages ago, right? When we started talking about alignment, when we started talking about what the machine sort of can be directed toward, what we have been...

kind of falling back on is not the idea that they are designed, but we've been saying, let's interpret the model through this lens of intentionality.

So they're complex systems.

And we encountered this already in this conversation, right? A lot of times I throw in air quotes around what you're throwing air quotes around is intentionality.

The model believes air quotes, right? You're flagging that because it's an intentionality.

We are, I am.