The Monster Inside ChatGPT

> How can anything be good without the awareness of evil?

Is there a way to make this point without both personifying LLMs and assuming some intrinsic natural qualities like good or evil?

An AI in in the present lacks the capacity for good and evil, morals, ethics, whatever. Why aren't developers, companies, integrators directly accountable? We haven't approached full Ghost in the Shell yet.

This is a bit like saying a computer engineer who wrote and understands a simple RISC machine in college thereby automatically understands all programs that could be compiled for it.

Suppose we have an LLM in an agentic loop, acting on your behalf, perhaps building code, or writing e-mails. Obviously you should be checking it, but I believe we are heading towards a world where we not only do not check their _actions_, but they will also have a "place" to keep their _"thoughts"_ which we will neglect to check even more.

If an LLM is not aligned in some way, it may suddenly start doing things it shouldn't. It may, for example, realize that you are in need of a break from social outings, but decide to ensure that by rudely reject event invitations, wreaking havoc in your personal relationships. It may see that you are in need of money and resort to somehow scamming people.

Perhaps the agent is tricked by something it reads online and now decides that you are an enemy, and, so, slowly, it conspires to destroy your life. If it can control your house appliances, perhaps it does something to keep you inside or, worse, to actually hurt you.

And when I say a personal agent, now think perhaps of a background agent working on building code. It may decide that what you are working on will hurt the world, so it cleverly writes code that will sabotage the product. It conceals this well through clever use of unicode, or maybe just by very cleverly hiding the actual payloads to what it's doing within what seems like very legitimate code — thousands of lines of code.

This may seem like science fiction, but if you actually think about it for a while, it really isn't. It's a very real scenario that we're heading very fast towards.

I will concede that perhaps the problems I am describing transcend the issue of alignment, but I do think that research into alignment is essential to ensure we can work on these specific issues.

Note that this does not mean I am against uncensored models. I think uncensored/"unaligned" models are essential. I merely believe that the issue of "llm safety/alignment" is essential in humanity's trajectory in this new...."transhuman" or "post-human" path.

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I don’t know what is happening in the rest of the world, but here in the Dominican Republic (where a major export is sugar, ironically) almost all soft drinks are laced with sucralose. This includes the not-labeled-as-reduced-calorie offerings from Coca Cola, PepsiCo, and nestle.

The Coca Cola labeling specifically appears intentionally deceptive. It is labeled “Coca Cola Sabor Original” with a tiny note near the fluid ounces that says “menos azucar”. On the back, it repeats the large “original flavor” label, with a subtext (larger Than the “less sugar” label) that claims that Coca Cola-less sugar contains 30 percent less sugar than the (big label again) “original flavor”. The upshot is that to understand that what you are buying is not, in fact, “original flavor” Coca Cola you have to be willing to look through the fine print and do some mental gymnastics, since the bottle is clearly labeled “Original Flavor”.

It tastes almost the same as straight up Diet Coke. All of the other local companies have followed suit with no change at all In labeling, which is nominally less dishonest than intentionally deceptive labeling.

Since I have a poor reaction to sucralose, including gut function and headache, I find this incredibly annoying. OTOH it has reduced my intake of soft drinks to nearly zero, so I guess it is indeed healthier XD?