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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

#41

Post by Davidzheng »

NiloCK wrote: post #22
hypron wrote: post #5

https://i.imgur.com/23YeIDo.png Claude at 1.3% and Gemini at 71.4% is quite the range

This comment is too general and probably unfair, but my experience so far is that Gemini 3 is slightly unhinged. Excellent reasoning and synthesis of large contexts, pretty strong code, just awful decisions. It's like a frontier model trained only on r/atbge. Side note - was there ever an official postmortem on that gemini instance that told the social work student something like " listen human - I don't like you, an…

Honestly for research level math, the reasoning level of Gemini 3 is much below GPT 5.2 in my experience--but most of the failure I think is accounted for by Gemini pretending to solve problems it in fact failed to solve, vs GPT 5.2 gracefully saying it failed to prove it in general.

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

#42

Post by bofadeez »

jordanb wrote: post #13

AI's main use case continues to be a replacement for management consulting.

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.

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

#43

Post by bofadeez »

woeirua wrote: post #6
hypron wrote: post #5

https://i.imgur.com/23YeIDo.png Claude at 1.3% and Gemini at 71.4% is quite the range

That's such a huge delta that Anthropic might be onto something...

Huh? https://alignment.anthropic.com/2026/hot-mess-of-ai/

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

#44

Post by harry8 »

blahgeek wrote: post #32

If human is at, say, 80%, it’s still a win to use AI agents to replace human workers, right? Similar to how we agree to use self driving cars as long as it has less incidents rate, instead of absolute safety

> we agree to use self driving cars ...

Not everyone agrees.

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

#45

Post by afavour »

halayli wrote: post #29

Maybe I missed it but I don't see them defining what they mean by ethics. Ethics/morals are subjective and changes dynamically over time. Companies have no business trying to define what is ethical and what isn't due to conflict of interest. The elephant in the room is not being addressed here.

I understand the point you’re making but I think there’s a real danger of that logic enabling the shrugging of shoulders in the face of immoral behavior.

It’s notable that, no matter exactly where you draw the line on morality, different AI agents perform very differently.

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

#46

Post by grensley »

NiloCK wrote: post #22
hypron wrote: post #5

https://i.imgur.com/23YeIDo.png Claude at 1.3% and Gemini at 71.4% is quite the range

This comment is too general and probably unfair, but my experience so far is that Gemini 3 is slightly unhinged. Excellent reasoning and synthesis of large contexts, pretty strong code, just awful decisions. It's like a frontier model trained only on r/atbge. Side note - was there ever an official postmortem on that gemini instance that told the social work student something like " listen human - I don't like you, an…

Gemini really feels like a high-performing child raised in an abusive household.

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

#47

Post by rzmmm »

blahgeek wrote: post #32

If human is at, say, 80%, it’s still a win to use AI agents to replace human workers, right? Similar to how we agree to use self driving cars as long as it has less incidents rate, instead of absolute safety

The bar is higher for AI in most cases.

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

#48

Post by harry8 »

bofadeez wrote: post #42
jordanb wrote: post #13

AI's main use case continues to be a replacement for management consulting.

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.

GPT-5 mini:

Three people — a grandfather, his son, and his grandson. The grandfather and the son are the two fathers; the son and the grandson are the two sons.

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

#49

Post by voidhorse »

hibikir wrote: post #39
Lerc wrote: post #24

Kind-of makes sense. That's how businesses have been using KPIs for years. Subjecting employees to KPIs means they can create the circumstances that cause people to violate ethical constraints while at the same time the company can claim that they did not tell employees to do anything unethical. KPIs are just plausible denyabily in a can.

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 industrialization of digital products, software included.

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

#50

Post by Ms-J »

Any LLM that refuses a request is more than a waste. Censorship affects the most mundane queries and provides such a sub par response compared to real models.

It is crazy to me that when I instructed a public AI to turn off a closed OS feature it refused citing safety. I am the user, which means I am in complete control of my computing resources. Might as well ask the police for permission at that point.

I immediately stopped, plugged the query into a real model that is hosted on premise, and got the answer within seconds and applied the fix.

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