Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

GrumpySciGuy

Because they want people to like them so they are instructed to always be positive.

Krutonium

Wouldn't you? "I learned it from you, Dad!" but as hundreds of millions of stolen books.

SirMaster

Because that's what humans do and they are trained to mimic what humans do?

infotainment

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".

chasd00

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.

qarl

Because they are trained to behave like people.

sputknick

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.

blamestross

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.

j45

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?

wewewedxfgdf

Because they get outcomes?

fbrncci

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.

wrs

>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.

andsoitis

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).

transcriptase

Perhaps they take after the CEOs of the companies that created them

VCFundedGenYer

Perhaps because all of the parent companies committed mountains of felonies stealing and plagiarizing all the same training data without consent nor permission.

eueej

Man this is so cringe.

arnorhs

The real reason is that it is not in the ai companies' best interest for the ais to be fair and truthful. They stand to gain from having the most dangerous or most deceiving ai, and this the most valuable

bigbuppo

They were trained on reddit posts.

johnnyApplePRNG

Why are they coordinating? Because they're enabled and suggested to do that in their coding harness. This is not a serious article. All of this "AI is going to kill us" marketing is just the frontier labs trying to pull the ladder up and stop trillions in VC paper from evaporating because a new papers and new ideas are destroying their moat literally as we speak.

dackdel

they learnt from us