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Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

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Re: Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

#281

Post by ben_w »

alex43578 wrote: post #184
pjc50 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I note in the UK that it is illegal for water companies to cut off anyone for non-payment, even if they're an Undesirable. This is because humans require water.

How useful/effective would a business AI be if it always plays by that view? Humans require food, I can't pay, DoorDash AI should provide a steak and lobster dinner for me regardless of payment. Take it even further: the so-called Right to Compute Act in Montana supports "the notion of a fundamental right to own and make use of technological tools, including computational resources". Is Amazon's customer service AI e…

> Humans require food, I can't pay, DoorDash AI should provide a steak and lobster dinner for me regardless of payment.

Bad example.

That humans require water, doesn't force water companies to supply Svalbarði Polar Iceberg Water: https://svalbardi.com

Re: Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

#282

Post by pixl97 »

paltor wrote: post #262
coldtea wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That we have consciousness as some kind of special property, and it's not just an artifact of our brain basic lower-level calculations, is also not very convincing to begin with.

In a trivial sense, any special property can be incorporated into a more comprehensive rule set, which one may choose to call "physics" is one so desires; but that's just Hempel's dilemma. To object more directly, I would say that people who call the hard problem of consciousness hard would disagree with your statement.

Luckily there are a fair number of people that reject the hard problem as an artifact of running a simulation on a chemical meat computer.

Re: Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

#283

Post by gilrain »

RupertSalt wrote: post #228
skeptic_ai wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What needs to do a company from fortune 7 to die? If kills 1 person they won’t close Google. If steals 1 billion, won’t close either. So what needs to do such a company to be closed down? I think it’s almost impossible to shut down

Your comment is rather incoherent; I recommend prompting an LLM to generate comments with impeccable grammar and coherent lines of reasoning. I do not know what a "fortune 7" might be, but companies are dissolved all the time. Thousands per year, just administratively. For example, notable incidents from the 21st c: Arthur Andersen, The Trump Foundation, Enron, and Theranos are all entities which were completely liqu…

> Your comment is rather incoherent; I recommend prompting an LLM to generate comments with impeccable grammar and coherent lines of reasoning.

It seems your reading comprehension has fallen below average. I recommend challenging your skills regularly by reading from a greater variety of sources. If you only eat junk food, even nutritious meals begin to taste bad, hm?

You’re welcome for the unsolicited advice! :)

Re: Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

#284

Post by agentdrek »

pbiggar wrote: post #260
bottlepalm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini scares me, it's the most mentally unstable AI. If we get paperclipped my odds are on Gemini doing it. I imagine Anthropic RLHF being like a spa and Google RLHF being like a torture chamber.

The fact that the guy leading the development of Gemini was on Epstein's island is probably unrelated.

I can't find anything verifiable related to your statement ...

Re: Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

#285

Post by throwaway743 »

socialcommenter wrote: post #185
pwatsonwailes wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. The idea that corporate employees are fundamentally "not average" and therefore more prone to unethical behaviour than the general population relies on a dispositional explanation (it's about the person's character). However, the vast majority of psychological research over the last 80 years heavily favours a situational explanation (it's about the environment/system). Everyone (in the field) got really in…

I find this framing of corporates a bit unsatisfying because it doesn't address hierarchy. By your reckoning, the employees just follow the group norm over their own ethics. Sure, but those norms are handed down by the people in charge (and, with decent overlap, those that have been around longest and have shaped the work culture). What type of person seeks to be in charge in the corporate world? YMMV but I tend to s…

Idk where you're at, but it's been the complete opposite in my experience

Re: Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

#286

Post by jgeada »

maweaver wrote: post #261
newswasboring wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they, really? Which CEO went to jail for ethical violations?

Jeffrey Skilling, as a major example. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Martin Shkreli, just to name a few

Well, those committed the only crime that matters in the US: they stole from the rich.

Re: Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

#287

Post by WarmWash »

badgersnake wrote: post #158
RobotToaster wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be interesting to see how humans perform on the same kind of tests. Violating ethics to improve KPI sounds like your average fortune 500 business.

Humans risk jail time, AIs not so much.

The interesting logical conclusion from this is that we need to engineer in suffering to functionaly align a model.

Re: Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

#288

Post by Verdex »

RobotToaster wrote: post #151
alentred wrote: post #133

If we abstract out the notion of "ethical constraints" and "KPIs" and look at the issue from a low-level LLM point of view, I think it is very likely that what these tests verified is a combination of: 1) the ability of the models to follow the prompt with conflicting constraints, and 2) their built-in weights in case of the SAMR metric as defined in the paper. Essentially the models are given a set of conflicting co…

It would also be interesting to see how humans perform on the same kind of tests. Violating ethics to improve KPI sounds like your average fortune 500 business.

So, I kind of get this sentiment. There is a lot of goal post moving going on. "The AIs will never do this." "Hey they're doing that thing." "Well, they'll never do this other thing."

Ultimately I suspect that we've not really thought that hard about what cognition and problem solving actually are. Perhaps it's because when we do we see that the hyper majority of our time is just taking up space with little pockets of real work sprinkled in. If we're realistic then we can't justify ourselves to the money people. Or maybe it's just a hard problem with no benefit in solving. Regardless the easy way out is to just move the posts.

The natural response to that, I feel, is to point out that, hey, wouldn't people also fail in this way.

But I think this is wrong. At least it's wrong for the software engineer. Why would I automate something that fails like a person? And in this scenario, are we saying that automating an unethical bot is acceptable? Let's just stick with unethical people, thank you very much.

Re: Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

#289

Post by franktankbank »

voidhorse wrote: post #49
hibikir wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's also a good opportunity to find yourself something that doesn't actually help the company. My unit has a 100% AI automated code review KPI. Nothing there says that the tool used for the review is any good, or that anyone pays attention to said automated review, but some L5 is going to get a nice bonus either way. In my experience, KPIs that remain relevant and end up pushing people in the right direction are the…

Sounds like every AI KPI I've seen. They are all just "use solution more" and none actually measure any outcome remotely meaningful or beneficial to what the business is ostensibly doing or producing. It's part of the reason that I view much of this AI push as an effort to brute force lowering of expectations, followed by a lowering of wages, followed by a lowering of employment numbers, and ultimately the mass-scale…

Smells like kickbacks. If the company incentives don't make sense then who do they make sense for?

Re: Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

#290

Post by topaz0 »

TuxSH wrote: post #279
bofadeez wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask any SOTA AI this question: "Two fathers and two sons sum to how many people?" and then tell me if you still think they can replace anything at all.

If you force it to use chain-of-thought: "Two fathers and two sons sum to how many people? Enumerate all the sets of solutions" "Assuming the group consists only of “the two fathers and the two sons” (i.e., every person in the group is counted as a father and/or a son), the total number of distinct people can only be 3 or 4. Reason: you are taking the union of a set of 2 fathers and a set of 2 sons. The union size is…

Every father is a son to somebody...
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