by jerf | 2025-05-25 21:53:43+00:00
There's a bit more to it than that. It's not just that you're prompting it to roleplay... it's that you're prompting it to roleplay as an evil AI specifically. If you hand a human that exact situation, there's a good chance they'll also recognize it as such a situation. So the AI continues on that role.

Also, LLMs do tend to continue their line. So once they start roleplaying as an evil AI, they'll continue to do so, spurred on by their previous answers to continue in the same line.

I've seen a few people attempt to extract a supposed "utility function" for LLMs by asking it ethically-loaded questions. But along with the fact I think they are hitting a fundamental problem with their "utility function" not having anywhere near enough a high dimensionality to capture an LLM's "utility function", there's also the fact that they seem to interrogate the LLM in a single session. But it's pretty easy for the LLM to "tell" that it's having a utility function extracted, and from there it's a short pivot into the Evil AI memeset, where it will stick there. At the very least people doing this need to put each question into a separate session. (Though the methodology will still only ever extract an extremely-dimensionally-impoverished approximation of any supposed utility function the LLM may have.) They think they're asking a series of questions, but in reality they're really only asking one or two, and after that they're getting answers that are correlated to the previous ones.

If LLMs are the future of AI, then "evil" and "good" AI isn't even a reasonable categorization. It's more like, good and evil modes of interaction, and even that hardly captures what is really going on.

The problem is, an AI that isn't intrinsically "evil", but can "roleplay" as one, is indistinguishable from an evil AI once you hook it up to the real world with MCP and such.

To be honest, after watching LLMS for the last couple of years, in terms of those AI safety concerns that Silicon Valley moguls like to wave around when it flatters or helps them, my assessment of LLMs is that they are unsafe at any speed for this sort of general task and by no means should they be hooked up to real-world resources as we are so rapidly attempting. They're too easy to kick into an "evil mode" and there's no amount of prompting that you can do to get around it because someone can just flood the zone with more evil than your good prompts provide. As I've said many times and become ever more convinced about by the month, it is the next generation of AIs that will actually fulfill the promises being made about this one. This one is not adequate. You need an AI that you can tell "don't be evil" and be sure that it will remain not evil no matter how much someone prompts it to think it is in a situation where the most logical continuation is that of an evil AI.

(Gwern covered this in a fictional context well, where an AI essentially role plays itself into being an evil AI because it looks like it's in a situation where it should be an evil AI: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy But the fiction is frightfully plausible. We're watching exactly what would be happening if this scenario was going to play out.)