Alignment is indeed a red herring, but the article conflates alignment training of the model itself and prompting a bot based on that model. Musk's manipulations with Grok are definitely the latter.
Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
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Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
#62The 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…
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…
He was public and vocal about it while the other big boys just quietly made the fixes towards their desired political viewpoint. ChatGPT was famous for correcting the anti-transgender bias it had earlier.
Either way, outsourcing opinion to an LLM is dangerous no matter where you fall in the political spectrum.
Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
#63The 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…
You didn't read the article. Sci-fi AGI isn't discussed. Subjective control of society by a handful of billionaires with fringe opinions is
Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
#64I don't think Musk mucking around with Grok is an argument against AI Alignment any more than him potentially acting immorally is an argument against morality. It just illustrates that both things are complicated.
Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
#65The 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 difference is the power people have. A single person has no capacity to spread their specific perspective to tens of millions of people, who take it as gospel. And that person, typically, cannot be made to change their perspective at will.
Gestures wildly at the 20th century.
Or a more recent example would be the "misinformation craze" we had going on since years ago. That seems to have fallen away when it became apparent that many fact checkers were politically aligned.
The concept of "memes" in a more general sense is a counterargument too. Viral ideas are precisely a way of one person spreading their perspective to tens of millions.
You could even argue that the current AI bubble building up is a hype cycle that went out of control.
These are all examples of very few people impacting the beliefs of millions.
Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
#66While I agree entirely about what Grok teaches us about alignment, I think the argument that "alignment was never a technical problem" is false. Everything I have ever read about AI safety and alignment have started by pointing out the fundamental problem of deciding what values to align to because humanity doesn't have a consistent set of values. Nonetheless, there is a technical challenge because whatever values we choose, we need a way to get the models to follow those values. We need both. The engineers are solving the technical problem; they need others to solve the social problem.
Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
#67I find these arguments excessively pessimistic in a way that isn’t useful. On the one hand I don’t really love Claude, because I find it excessively obedient, it basically wants to follow me through my thought process whatever that is. Every once in a lone while it might disagree with me, but not often, and while that may say something about me, I suspect it also says something about Claude. But this to me is maybe t…
Why can't you instruct Claude to provide (constructive) opposing views, (better) alternative ideas, etc.
Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
#68[dead]
Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
#69the definition of rights，belongs to the ownership of rights.
rights are only responsible for the source of rights.
Re: Grok and the Naked King: The Ultimate Argument Against AI Alignment
#70I find these arguments excessively pessimistic in a way that isn’t useful. On the one hand I don’t really love Claude, because I find it excessively obedient, it basically wants to follow me through my thought process whatever that is. Every once in a lone while it might disagree with me, but not often, and while that may say something about me, I suspect it also says something about Claude. But this to me is maybe t…
Why can't you instruct Claude to provide (constructive) opposing views, (better) alternative ideas, etc.
Because it’s exhausting to read through half-hearted badly sourced alternative replies that often end with “if I had to make an argument that’s what I would say, but note that the research suggests otherwise” or some such thing.