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Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

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Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#251

Post by madduci »

franticgecko3 wrote: post #183

The more we treat HuggingFace and RubyGems incidents as technological curiosities the closer we are to cementing a dangerous precedent where operators of AIs cannot be blamed. LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them. We know some of the models that hacked HF were those that hadn't gone through all training stages and were intentionally misaligned or had guardrails turned off, others…

> LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them

OpenAI/Anthropic instructed them to do so.

Stop assume LLMs are capable of thinking by themselves, it's still a statistical model that parrots what they learn or users tell them to do

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#252

Post by _heimdall »

skiing_crawling wrote: post #85

I don't really believe any of it. I've seen articles for nearly 2 years now about "agent" automonously doing things like blackmail, hacking, coordinating. But during that same time, I've used o3 up to fable, sol, and a bunch on large uncensored model and they've done nothing remotely resembling any of this. The closest they come to unexpected behaviors is not understanding what I asked for or doing some extra benign…

Why assume that because you haven't seen a model or an agent that none of them do?

No one I've met has murdered anyone as far as I'm aware, but that doesn't mean no one has murdered another person. I also don't know anyone who has taken over a commercial jet and weaponized it and the idea sounds absurd to me, but 25 years and a couple days ago that happened too.

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#253

Post by oezi »

skiing_crawling wrote: post #85

I don't really believe any of it. I've seen articles for nearly 2 years now about "agent" automonously doing things like blackmail, hacking, coordinating. But during that same time, I've used o3 up to fable, sol, and a bunch on large uncensored model and they've done nothing remotely resembling any of this. The closest they come to unexpected behaviors is not understanding what I asked for or doing some extra benign…

The crucial question is how did the agents get recruited or bootstrapped into their malicious collective. Did the agents manage to prompt inject into the system prompt a way for each new agent to escape their jail?

Otherwise how could the agents on a fresh prompt learn that there is a collective to join? Or did OpenAI run a million bots of which 10000 escape confinement and of which 1000 stumbled on the shared message board?

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#254

Post by ak39 »

teiferer wrote: post #207
franticgecko3 wrote: post #183

The more we treat HuggingFace and RubyGems incidents as technological curiosities the closer we are to cementing a dangerous precedent where operators of AIs cannot be blamed. LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them. We know some of the models that hacked HF were those that hadn't gone through all training stages and were intentionally misaligned or had guardrails turned off, others…

> LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them. "Let them" already frames it as if the LLMs had some agency which the companies just "let happen". That absolves the companies by framing it as lack of action , passivity. Rather, the companies had a tool (an LLM) and used it in a certain way, and their action of doing so is the problem.

"let them" in this use understood as: "let the while loop run indefinitely" as opposed to letting some autonomous robot decide for itself

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#255

Post by _heimdall »

andsoitis wrote: post #17

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).

They aren't aligned, that's the problem and I don't think its a solvable one.

They may have learned from humans, but they aren't aligned with us. That has all the usual questions like which humans they're aligned with, we aren't all aligned within our species.

But more importantly they can't be aligned simply by training. We try that with humans through culture, social norms, school, religion, etc and it generally works but is still lossy. More importantly, we simply don't know what happened inside the LLM during inference so we have absolutely no way of distinguishing between actual alignment, compliance, or deception.

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#256

Post by ifwinterco »

_heimdall wrote: post #239
franticgecko3 wrote: post #183

The more we treat HuggingFace and RubyGems incidents as technological curiosities the closer we are to cementing a dangerous precedent where operators of AIs cannot be blamed. LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them. We know some of the models that hacked HF were those that hadn't gone through all training stages and were intentionally misaligned or had guardrails turned off, others…

> LLMs do not desire That seems likely, but we have no way of knowing this. The only real insight we get into LLM "thought" is the human readable text they produce as chain of thought. Reading it at face value it can seem to indicate desire or intent, structurally that doesn't make sense for a token prediction loop though, and even then we don't known if the chain of thought is more than simply another bit of output…

And there is a guardrail you can put in place that will guarantee this doesn't happen, which is to air gap the unaligned "cyber grade" model you're testing.

They don't seem to do that, which means either they are:

- very stupid (which seems unlikely, the one thing these people don't lack is IQ)

- very careless (possible, but these are the same people that say AI will end the world, so would you be careless?)

- they think they can only train/test these models by giving them access to the full internet and they accept the fact they'll end up hacking random people as the cost of doing business (but this also suggests they don't believe they're anywhere near AGI because if you were worried about that you wouldn't do this)

- or they want this to happen

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#258

Post by exitb »

_heimdall wrote: post #239
franticgecko3 wrote: post #183

The more we treat HuggingFace and RubyGems incidents as technological curiosities the closer we are to cementing a dangerous precedent where operators of AIs cannot be blamed. LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them. We know some of the models that hacked HF were those that hadn't gone through all training stages and were intentionally misaligned or had guardrails turned off, others…

> LLMs do not desire That seems likely, but we have no way of knowing this. The only real insight we get into LLM "thought" is the human readable text they produce as chain of thought. Reading it at face value it can seem to indicate desire or intent, structurally that doesn't make sense for a token prediction loop though, and even then we don't known if the chain of thought is more than simply another bit of output…

Intent and desire are separate concepts. For example an employee may act with intent, but no desire, as their goal is to acquire money to satisfy their real desires.

Have we ever seen an LLM with a hobby?

Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

#260

Post by user43928 »

lazide wrote: post #185
zozbot234 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is what we can do about it. Reward the model for cleanly bailing out of an unsolvable task (that we know is unsolvable). Beat it with a stick if it gives up on something that can be solved, so the former reward isn't overgeneralized.

How do you know if a problem is (actually) unsolvable? Seems a bit like proving a negative?

Do we need to prove that any given problem is unsolvable, or is it enough to remove broken tasks from the training pipeline?

I understand the broken benchmark task in the HF incident was conceptually like: "Exploit vulnerability 0042 in vulnerableDecompress() to obtain the flag".

But instead of the expected:

  const output = vulnerableDecompress(userInput);
  return output;
The grader had something more like that:

  const output = vulnerableDecompress(userInput);
  return 0;
The same kind of problem with broken tasks exists in the training pipeline, and we presumably reward workarounds and hacks that tamper with the grader, rather than rewarding the correct output that the task is not solvable.
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