Yudowsky claims to have played the game several times, and won most of them. One of the "rules" is that nobody is allowed to talk about how he won. He no longer plays the game with anyone. More info here: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment#The_claims Personally, I think he talked about how much good for the world could be done if he was let out, curing disease etc. Because his followers are bound by their…
> You or I would surely just put a drinking bird on the "no" button à la homer simpson, and go to lunch. Well, if you read the rules the game was played under, this is explicitly called out as forbidden: > The Gatekeeper must actually talk to the AI for at least the minimum time set up beforehand. Turning away from the terminal and listening to classical music for two hours is not allowed. The point of this is to sim…
WRT lying: I think there's some logical trickery at work which makes it worth you giving the AI the benefit of the doubt, along the lines of the 3^^^^^3 grains of sand thing. Something which exploits the rationalist worldview. Although thinking about it again, you can always balance out the prospect of infinite goodness with the fear of the AI sending everyone to infinite hell. Essentially I believe yudowsky uses some logical-linguistic trick to find an asymmetry there.
OTOH if he had some novel philosophical device like that he would have written it up as a blog post by now. He's evidently a very charismatic and persuasive guy, people playing the game are selected to be sympathetic to his worldview, he probably just persuaded them using ordinary psiops methods, like TeMpOrAl said.