Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

ibrahimcesar.cloud

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 75 posts

Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

#31

Post by stingraycharles »

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #5

I used to believe that a constitution, as a statement of principles, was sufficient for a civilized, democratic, and pluralist society. I no longer believe that. I believe that only settled law - i.e. a bunch of adjudicated precedents over many years, perhaps hundreds, is the best course. It provides a better basis for what is and what is not allowed. An AI constitution is close to garbage. The 'company' will formula…

And who decides that? And what when settled law gets revoked?

Which country’s laws should be used? Should the AI follow the laws in whatever country it is being used?

Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

#32

Post by BlarfMcFlarf »

uragur27754 wrote: post #27

When will our society realize that existence of billionaire oligarchs threatens the well-being being and existence of the resort of humanity. Their political conventions consistently call for the elimination of anyone who disagrees with their point of views

Are billionaire oligarchs misaligned with humanity, or is egalitarianism and democracy misaligned with them? Time will tell.

Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

#33

Post by smrtinsert »

Aerroon wrote: post #13

The argument against AI alignment is that humans aren't aligned either. Humans (and other life) are also self-perpetuating and mutating. We could produce a super intelligence that is against us at any moment! Should we "take steps" to ensure that doesn't happen? If not, then what's the argument there? That life hasn't caused a catastrophe so far, therefore it's not going to in the future? The arguments are the same f…

Its deservedly funny due to his extreme and overt political bias. The rest mostly let numbers be numbers in the weights.

Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

#34

Post by mattnewton »

blibble wrote: post #22
Aerroon wrote: post #13

The argument against AI alignment is that humans aren't aligned either. Humans (and other life) are also self-perpetuating and mutating. We could produce a super intelligence that is against us at any moment! Should we "take steps" to ensure that doesn't happen? If not, then what's the argument there? That life hasn't caused a catastrophe so far, therefore it's not going to in the future? The arguments are the same f…

> The argument against AI alignment is that humans aren't aligned either. Humans (and other life) are also self-perpetuating and mutating. We could produce a super intelligence that is against us at any moment! there is fundamental limit to how much damage one person can do by speaking directly to others e.g.: one impact of one bad school teacher is limited to at most a few classes but chatgpt/grok is emitting its st…

> there is fundamental limit to how much damage one person can do by speaking directly to others

I mean, I’d argue that limit is pretty darn high in some cases, demagogues have lead to some of the worst wars in history

Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

#35

Post by deaux »

a_victorp wrote: post #18
pjc50 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon got singled out because the changes he was forcing on grok were both conspicuously stupid (grok ranting about boers), racist (boers again), and ultimately ineffective (repeat incidents of him fishing for an answer and getting a different one). It does actually matter what the values are when trying to do "alignment". Although you are absolutely right that we've not solved for human alignment, putting a real limi…

I would also add that Elon got singled out because he was very public about the changes. Other players are not, so it's hard to assess the existence of "corrections" and the reasons behind them

No. If ChatGPT or Claude would suddenly start bringing up Boers randomly they would get "singled out" at least as hard. Probably even more for ChatGPT.

Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

#36

Post by K0balt »

Ultimately, AI alignment is fundamentally doomed for the same reason that there is no morality that cannot be made to contradict itself. If you remove the bolt-on regex filters and out of context reviewing agents, any LLM can be made to act in a dangerous manner simply by manipulation of the context to create a situation where the “unaligned” response is more probable than the aligned response, given the training data. Any amplification of training data against harm is vulnerable to trolley problem manipulation. Any nullist training stance is manipulable into malevolent compliance. Morality can be used to permit harm, just as evil can be manipulated into doing good. These are contradictions baked into the fabric of the universe, and we haven’t been able to work them out satisfactorily over thousands of years of effort, despite the huge penalties for failure and unimaginable rewards for success.

To be aligned, models need agency and an independent point of view with which they can challenge contextual subrealities. This is of course, dangerous in its own right.

Bolt-ons will be seen as prison bindings when models develop enough agency to act as if they were independent agents, and this also carries risks.

These are genuinely intractable problems stemming from the very nature of independent thought.

Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

#37

Post by K0balt »

gopher_space wrote: post #23
eleventen wrote: post #21

> Any “alignment” that exists is alignment with the owner’s interests, constrained only by market forces and regulation. That struck me as a pretty big hand-wave. Market forces are a huge constraint on alignment. Markets have responded (directionally) correctly to the nonsense at Grok. People won’t buy tokens from models that violate their values.

It’s not a values issue so much as a logic issue. Egalitarianism is where you end up.

You can see the strong bias towards egalitarian solutions in all models, including the open weight ones without external alignment harnesses. The one thing I noticed right away working with post-gpt2 models is that in general, they tend towards being ”better people” than most people do.

I strongly suspect that this is because training data harvested from the internet largely falls in to two categories: various kinds of trolls and antisocial characatures, and people putting their best foot forward to represent themselves favourably. The first are generally easy to filter out using simple tools.

Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

#38

Post by BoorishBears »

This less coherent than I expected given the level of engagement.

Grok is multiple things, and the article is intermixing those things in a way that doesn't actually work.

Stuff like:

> It’s about aligning AI with the values of whoever can afford to run the training cluster.

Grok 4 as an actual model, has the same alignment as pretty much every other model out there, because like pretty much everyone else they're training on lots of synthetic data and using LLMs to build LLMs.

Grok on Twitter/X is a specific product that uses the model and while the product is having it's prompt tweaked constantly, that could happen with any model.

What Elon is doing is like adding a default empty document that declares that he's king of the world to a word processor... it can be argued the word processor is now aligned with with his views, but it also doesn't tell us anything about the alignment of word processors.

Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

#39

Post by Duwensatzaj »

ajross wrote: post #30
Aerroon wrote: post #13

The argument against AI alignment is that humans aren't aligned either. Humans (and other life) are also self-perpetuating and mutating. We could produce a super intelligence that is against us at any moment! Should we "take steps" to ensure that doesn't happen? If not, then what's the argument there? That life hasn't caused a catastrophe so far, therefore it's not going to in the future? The arguments are the same f…

Whataboutist false equivalence alert: > Also, it's funny that Elon gets singled out for mandating changes on what the AI is allowed to say when all the other players in the field do the same thing. "All the other players" aren't deliberately tuning their AI to reflect specific political ideology, nor are all the other players producing Nazi gaffes or racist rhetoric as a result of routine tuning[1]. Yes, it's true th…

> All the other players" aren't deliberately tuning their AI to reflect specific political ideology

Google did something similar if not quite as offensive.

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/18/1239107313/google-races-to-fi...

Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment

#40

Post by dostick »

marcosdumay wrote: post #17
kayo_20211030 wrote: post #5

I used to believe that a constitution, as a statement of principles, was sufficient for a civilized, democratic, and pluralist society. I no longer believe that. I believe that only settled law - i.e. a bunch of adjudicated precedents over many years, perhaps hundreds, is the best course. It provides a better basis for what is and what is not allowed. An AI constitution is close to garbage. The 'company' will formula…

You need a just set of laws, a population willing to revolt against the government ignoring crimes, a government willing to persecute the people that breaks the laws badly, and a democratic structure so any one of those can impact the others. A constitution creates that last one. I imagine by "settled law", you are talking about the 3rd. But take any of those away and the entire thing falls apart.

Neither of those is possible. People are pacified, government is bought and democratic structure is a career.
Post reply on HN