"Evaluating the historical value misspecification argument" by Matthew Barnett

ETA: I'm not saying that MIRI thought AIs wouldn't understand human values. If there's only one thing you take away from this post, please don't take away that.

Recently, many people have talked about whether some of the main MIRI people (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nate Soares, and Rob Bensinger[1]) should update on whether value alignment is easier than they thought given that GPT-4 seems to follow human directions and act within moral constraints pretty well (here are two specific examples of people talking about this: 1, 2). Because these conversations are often hard to follow without much context, I'll just provide a brief caricature of how I think this argument has gone in the places I've seen it, which admittedly could be unfair to MIRI[2]. Then I'll offer my opinion that, overall, I think MIRI people should probably update in the direction of alignment being easier than they thought in light of this information, despite their objections.

Note: I encourage you to read this post carefully to understand my thesis. This topic can be confusing, and there are many ways to misread what I'm saying. Also, make sure to read the footnotes if you're skeptical of some of my claims.

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i5kijcjFJD6bn7dwq/evaluating-the-historical-value-misspecification-argument

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