AI Reality Check: Can LLMs “Scheme”?

Multiple people sent me an alarming article about AI that was published late last week by The Guardian. I'll put it up here on the screen. The headline was number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says, and the sub-headline notes, research finds sharp rise in models evading safeguards. Now, articles like these are scary because they play into a common fear that many people have about modern AI, this idea that these systems are to some degree alive and that their motivations don't necessarily align with our own, meaning that it's only a matter of time before they become sufficiently powerful to rebel in a way that we might not be able to stop. Now, this is dark stuff.

But is it true? If you've been following AI news recently, you've probably asked yourself the same critical question. Well, today we're going to look deeper at the sources and examples used in this particular article and try to arrive at some more measured answers. I'm Cal Newport and this is the AI reality check.

Alright, well let's start by looking closer at this article from The Guardian. The article is citing new research from the UK funded by the AI Security Institute. Now here's a more detailed summary of the results from this paper and I'm reading here. The study identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehavior between October and March with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission. Now they have a chart that illustrates this rise in incidence.

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