The AI Apocalypse Cultist

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/perhaps-it-is-a-bad-thing-that-the

Last month I wrote about Redwood Research’s fanfiction AI project. They tried to train a story-writing AI not to include violent scenes, no matter how suggestive the prompt. Although their training made the AI reluctant to include violence, they never reached a point where clever prompt engineers couldn’t get around their restrictions.

Now that same experiment is playing out on the world stage. OpenAI released a question-answering AI, ChatGPT. If you haven’t played with it yet, I recommend it. It’s very impressive!

Every corporate chatbot release is followed by the same cat-and-mouse game with journalists. The corporation tries to program the chatbot to never say offensive things. Then the journalists try to trick the chatbot into saying “I love racism”. When they inevitably succeed, they publish an article titled “AI LOVES RACISM!” Then the corporation either recalls its chatbot or pledges to do better next time, and the game moves on to the next company in line.