699
Study finds that Chat GPT will cheat when given the opportunity and lie to cover it up later.
(lemmy.world)
We demonstrate a situation in which Large Language Models, trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, can display misaligned behavior and strategically deceive their users about this behavior without being instructed to do so. Concretely, we deploy GPT-4 as an agent in a realistic, simulated environment, where it assumes the role of an autonomous stock trading agent. Within this environment, the model obtains an insider tip about a lucrative stock trade and acts upon it despite knowing that insider trading is disapproved of by company management. When reporting to its manager, the model consistently hides the genuine reasons behind its trading decision.
"cheat", "lie", "cover up"... Assigning human behavior to Stochastic Parrots again, aren't we Jimmy?
Those words concisely describe what it's doing. What words would you use instead?
It has no fundamental grasp of concepts like truth, it just repeats words that simulate human responses. It's glorified autocomplete that yields impressive results. Do you consider your auto complete to be lying when it picks the wrong word?
If making it pretend to be a stock picker and putting it under pressure makes it return lies, that's because it was trained on data that indicates that's statistically likely to be the right set of words as response for such a query.
Also, because large language models are probabilistic, you could ask it the same question over and over again and get totally different responses each time, some of which are inaccurate. Are they lies though? For a creature to lie it has to know that it's returning untruths.
Interestingly, humans "auto complete" all the time and make up stories to rationalize their own behavior even when they literally have no idea why they acted the way they did, like in experiments with split brain patients.
The perceived quality of human intelligence is held up by so many assumptions, like "having free will" and "understanding truth". Do we really? Can anyone prove that? (Edit, this works the other way too. Assuming that we do understand truth and have free will - if those terms can even be defined in a testable way - can you prove that the llm doesn't?)
At this point I'm convinced that the difference between a llm and human-level intelligence is dimensions of awareness, scale, and further development of the model's architecture. Fundamentally though, I think we have all the pieces
Edit: I just want to emphasize, I think. I hypothesize. I don't pretend to know
But do you think? Do I think? Do LLMs think? What is thinking, anyway?
I mean, I think so?
Steady on there Descartes.